Posthumous Refutation

We don’t go in for wakes much in the Scottish Episcopal Church, but my Uncle Porpy (who died a few days ago) insisted in his will that we have one for him.  This is typical of his insensitivity.  Only somewhat do I regret referring to him as an ‘incurious puritanical git’ in these pages last week.  Knowing him was, to put it bluntly, a strain; and being related to him was at times insufferable.

It could have been worse, I suppose.

How well we can all recall the time, during an estate-boundary dispute with the MacMelvins, he not only armed us all with .410s (down to the age of nine!) but called out the county militia.  It was on his watch that the roof of the North Range fell in, and (on a separate occasion) that the so-called Temple of Dionysius on the far side of the loch burned down.  It was citing Porpy’s pig-headedness that Smeaton’s father (then our head keeper) unceremoniously quit and emigrated to Australia; and it was during Porpy’s financial management of my own income that the said income was halved.  To top it all off, while Porpy was managing the estate (in the antipodean absence of Smeaton the Elder), our population of delicious grey partridge fell by 40%, even as the numbers of the odious grey squirrel rose by a similar amount.

Yes, that's right, you heard me, 'odious'.

To say that Porpy was one of the least-liked members of our family, or indeed the whole county community, would be an understatement.

The wake, then, therefore, held a number of surprises.

For one thing, Old MacMelvin’s grandson came.  He not only bore us no apparent ill-will, but he said that Porpy’s ‘robust’ response to the land-grab (which he freely admitted) had caused his grandfather to abandon an even more audacious scheme that would have involved diverting the course of the Fitchie Burn past his own drawing-room windows, to the permanent disadvantage of our home farm.

I had just taken this information on board when a now-fiftysomething village lad named Iain apologised for smoking in the Temple of Dionysius, to its probable destruction.  We’d all known the fire was an accident caused by smoking, but just assumed it was Porpy’s damnable cigars.

We had never known him without one.

No sooner had Iain departed with skinful of Laphroaig, cig in paw, than I was approached by a ninetysomething surveyor of Ancient Monuments.  This elderly gentleman was unknown to me, but he said it was a great shame that Porpy had ‘carried the can’ for the North Range collapse; when in fact he (the surveyor) had told my great-grandfather it was about to fall down in 1938, some ten years before Porpy was born.

Then Smeaton’s mother handed me Porpy’s old carnelian signet-ring, which had disappeared around the time Smeaton the Elder had gone Down Under.  ‘Where on earth did you find it?’ I barked in surprise.  She hummed and hawed a bit but then admitted that over the years, Smeaton the Elder had stolen a whole bushel basket of Porpy’s jewellery; and now that both parties had passed on -- Smeaton of old age in HM Prison Geelong, State of Victoria -- she felt she should give the family back the one piece she’d been able to salvage from the whole unfortunate affair.

They say the gaol is haunted by the stories of where he hid the ring whilst incarcerated.

Our reminiscences were interrupted by the hearty condoling of our accountant, Mr. Ingram, who said, ‘Poor fellow!  Remember those racehorses?’  I replied truthfully that I did not, in fact, remember any racehorses.  Ingram went on promptly to explain that down to 1977, half of my personal income was tied up in a large syndicate of racehorses, formed by Porpy’s uncle Baldy just after the War.  The problem was, half of them died in ’77 of equine infectious anaemia, and the other half had never won any races in the first place.

I was just on my way out when a meek tug on my sleeve almost announced the presence of Dr. Moir, a local wildlife biologist who comes up to about my elbow.  To my very great surprise, he commended Porpy for his estate management.

‘Whatever do you mean?’ I cried. ‘On his watch, the partridges fell by two-fifths!’

‘But outside the estate,’ Moir mumbled, ‘they fell by three-fifths.’

If this story has a moral, I suppose it is, Don’t be irritating.  Irritating people get blamed for everything.

Now you tell me!