Perfick day

Over-smartly dressed in a light blue suit, sugar-pink shirt, blue and white tie and white buckskin shoes, a dandified curl in both his moustache and hair, Captain Broadbent arrived at the Larkin house about half past three on the following Sunday afternoon. The weather, as Pop had hoped it would be, was hot and the junk-yard a dozy dormitory of prostrate pigs, soporific geese, hens, turkeys and guinea-fowl all resting in the shade of ruined bits of machinery, elder trees and haystacks. Pop’s yellow-and-black Rolls Royce stood under a corrugated hovel and the new Jaguar, a discreet dove-grey, in the shade of a willow tree whose gently turning leaves provided almost the only movement in the summer air.
Outside the front door of the house, to Captain Broadbent’s astonishment, stood the two suits of armour, each now nursing a battle-axe in its arms. Ma had decided after all that the inside passage was slightly cramped for them, especially after she had run sharply into them in the twilight one evening. She thought that if anything they looked even more classy outside than in and Pop was inclined to agree with her, especially at night, when he was able to switch on the red, yellow and blue fairy light inside the vizors.
Walking round to the back of the house, Captain Broadbent presently found himself facing a scene that merely served to increase the contemptuous astonishment already aroused by junk, armour and general farmyard menagerie. People simply didn’t live like this; it just wasn’t done. The big swimming pool, its depth a brilliant turquoise blue, was almost indecent in its ostentation, a blown-up status symbol if ever there was one. The screaming of many children reminded him of one of those awful day trips to the seaside. More astonishing than anything else, perhaps, was the fact that Pop, in anticipation of Mademoiselle Dupont’s visit from France, had already run up the tricolor on one side of the top diving board, with the Union Jack on the other. Ma had badly wanted to fly the Royal Standard too, but Montgomery had pointed out that you couldn’t do that unless the Queen was in residence, which wasn’t likely to be yet. Ma, a fervent royalist, said more was the pity.
Half-way along one side of the pool Ma, in a bright canary yellow bathing costume, gave the impression of a large well-filled balloon that had ever so gently descended from space and was now resting on the tiniest of camp stools. She was painting on a really large canvas today, trying to embrace the entire pool, tricolor Union Jack, gambolling figures and all.
On the opposite side of the pool was erected a piece of apparatus the like of which Captain Broadbent couldn’t ever remember seeing before. It beat the band, he told himself, for sheer vulgarity. He supposed the thing was some sort of portable drink-wagon or bar. The entire affair was made of bamboo, with a roof of palm thatch and designs of coconut and pineapple scratched about it in dark poker-work, so that the whole had a marked Polynesian effect. It was set about with glasses of all colours, emerald, vermillion, purple, amber and blue, together with corkscrews, bottle-openers as big as horse-shoes and scores of bottles and siphons of different kinds. It looked like something out of some beastly opera, Captain Broadbent thought.
He was just on the point of turning his back on second and even louder symbol of status when Pop, with splendid warmth, hailed him from behind the bar, shaking a vast silver cocktail shaker as his signal of welcome.
‘Ah! there you are, Colonel, Didn’t think you’d been able to find us. Perfick day, Colonel, eh?’

uit: Oh! To be in England - H.E. Bates

____