It seems that for some reason not included in the dream I was shopping for a couple of billhooks for my (long dead) mother, one large and one small, rather after the fashion of Elizabethan men of fighting with rapier in the right hand and dagger in the left. To this end I took myself to a department store, a store which now associates to John Lewis.
In the main part of the shop I quickly bought the large billhook from the primary gardening department, but did not find anything suitable in the way of small billhooks. After a while, someone suggested that I should go out the back, which I did, accompanied by this someone but of whom there is now no other trace than that accompaniment. We pick our way through various piles of rubbish, the sort of thing that accumulates round the back of large buildings (the sort of thing that one finds, for example, round the back of the shops in Oxford Street), to a sort of hut by the gate, a hut which now associates to a dirty & shabby shepherd's hut on wheels, the sort of thing which is now only made by self consciously crafty craftsmen to adorn the Surrey gardens of the rich and to serve as summer houses, studies and smoking dens. Nothing to do with sheep any more. Not at all dirty or shabby. Inside the hut was the rather grumpy bearded gentleman who ran the secondary gardening department, a gentleman who now associates to a bearded chap I used to work with at the building in Watford called the Orphanage which was once a Masonic Orphanage, later in the care of the Department of Employment and is now under a football pitch. I used to have a small allotment there, with a rather leaky hut made from five pallets. He used to be keen on narrow boats and used to tell us stories of the elaborately compact packing done by his wife against water borne emergencies of necessities for sewing, power cuts, mending boots and the like.
He led me through the dusty sheds, the nooks and crannies of his department, offering me all kinds of obscure and fantastic tools which he thought might do as the small billhook. Including a tool that used to belong to my parents, was called a machete (although shorter and more like a meat cleaver in shape than the sort of thing that some central Africans like to carve each other up with. And much heavier than the surprisingly light weight looking cutlasses which used to be used by some north European sailors to carve each other up with and which are now exhibited at Greenwich (see 29th November)), was used to chop kindling and which is still in our possession. Various short billhooks, the sort with an elaborately shaped wooden handle and which could be used with one hand. A small club hammer with a cubical head, maybe a two inch cube, with two pencil shaped spikes sticking out of the back of it, making the head look a bit like some kind of horned animal.
After spending some time at this, I decided that none of the tools on offer would do. The grumpy bearded gentleman became very grumpy, muttering loudly about time wasters. I wondered whether I ought to buy something to quieten him down, or perhaps simply to slip him a fiver by way of a tip. At which point the dream fizzled out.
PS: I remember now that a shepherd's hut on wheels is also the scene of adultery and of rather grim murder by runaway hut in a story by Maupassant. Perhaps 'Une Vie'. The Professor finds the illustration above which suggests that memory may be roughly on course for once. Note wheel, middle left.
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