Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood

The Dorking Rooster-Catcher

141 l The Dorking Rooster-Catcher Back in the 1950s, telegrams and long-distance calls usually meant trouble. We got one of each on a quiet Thursday evening in October 1956, when I was thirteen. They were the opening guns of our first and only day of hunting with an Englishman. The telegram was delivered just as Mom, Dad, and I were sitting down to supper in the kitchen. A taxi pulled up and the driver honked the horn. Dad took his pipe from the counter and followed Rip and Nip, our beagles, to the front door. The driver walked up to the porch, carrying a yellow envelope. “Western Union,” he said. “That’ll be a dollar.” Dad took a single from his wallet and found a fifty-cent piece among the keys and pipe tools in his pocket. Fifty cents was a good tip in 1956. Back in the kitchen, Dad slit the envelope with his pocketknife. Mom and I waited, barely breathing, expecting the worst. Dad read 142 TheDorkingRooster-Catcher the narrow strips of paper pasted to the telegraph form. “Well,” he said, “don’t get excited, everybody’s still alive. But we’re going to have company for the weekend.” Mom and I looked at the telegram. It was a marvel of economy, from the New York office of the company Dad worked for. It said: P P L A M F F T PM C&NW E H J NY. Dad translated. “Old man Jones says a guy named Perkins from London is coming on the train tomorrow afternoon. Why, he doesn’t say. And we’re supposed to extend hospitality. I guess that means we put him up.” The phone rang and I went into the dining room to answer it. “I have a person-to-person call for David Crehore,” the operator said. It couldn’t possibly have been for me, so I handed the receiver to Dad. After a couple of minutes Dad hung up. “That was Harry from the Chicago office,” he said. “He says this Perkins guy has done us some favors in the past. He had business in Chicago, and now Jones wants us to roll out the red carpet for him. Apparently he likes to hunt birds, so this trip has the earmarks of a junket. I wondered what was going on, and now I know—I’m elected to play grouse guide this weekend.” Mom shifted quickly into hostess mode. “Let’s see,” she said, “how can we make him feel at home? We have some tea, but beyond that, I’m not sure—English people eat things like herring and kidneys, and I don’t think the A&P carries them.” “We can have a beef roast Friday night, a ham on Saturday, grouse on Sunday, and sausages for breakfast. That’ll have to do,” Dad said. He was really extending hospitality; for us, that was about a month’s supply of high-grade meat. I couldn’t wait. Through my reading I had met many fictional Britons, ranging from the Water Rat to Sherlock Holmes, but never 143 a real one. Best of all, it was the weekend of the teachers’ convention, there would be no school on Friday, and I wouldn’t miss a thing. By the time I woke up the next morning, Dad had left for the office and Mom was giving the house an unscheduled fall cleaning. She had just started dusting the venetian blinds when Dad came home early. “That’s enough, Charlotte,” he said. “He won’t look at the blinds. The train comes in at four thirty, and I’ve got to get going. You coming, Davy?” At the station, Dad drummed his fingers nervously on the steering wheel. Maybe, like me, he was picturing Percival Perkins as a superior being: tall and imperious, impeccably dressed in tweeds, a man who would outshoot us in our own woods, condescend to us ever so politely, and make us feel like the small-town people we were. Before the tension could grow much more, the train pulled in and we walked to the platform. Six people got off, none of them remotely English. The conductor called, “’Board!” and the engineer gave a double toot on the whistle. Just as the train started moving, a thin middle-aged man jumped down to the platform. He had a tangled mop of grey...