A Hero of Our Times

A HERO OF OUR TIME

By Ernest Marlin

A Wegworld Ltd Publication ©2013

A Hero of Our Times

Bats of Bethesda

By Ernest Marlin

A Wegworld Ltd Publication

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Ernest Marlin 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publishers.

Events in this work are based loosely on real events, but have been changed and compiled to create a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents have been changed and are used in a purely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 1

David Llewellyn Evans sat at his desk in the solicitors’ office in a southern English market town where he was employed. He was, in fact, a partner in the long established and well respected firm, the long dead or retired former partners of which looked down sternly at him from their photograph frames on the walls.

Monocled, stiff collared and stern, they belonged to a different age when lawyers were made of different clay to ordinary mortals. The grandson of the founder was now the firm’s junior partner, but although he physically resembled his ancestor, the world in which he moved was radically different.

It was now the 1970s and England had changed. They even had women presuming to become lawyers. Only recently, they had received an application from a young woman for Articles; a form of apprenticeship preparatory to becoming a solicitor.

Not only had the junior partner who received the letter not immediately thrown it in the bin, but he had brought it up under ‘any other business,’ at the weekly partners’ meeting. That in itself was a measure of how things had changed. The senior partner had almost choked on his glass of dry sherry.

They had all agreed, of course, that it was out of the question. Not only did nobody know the family, but in the unlikely event of her being accepted into the firm, she would not have been allowed, as a woman, membership of the local constitutional or golf club, so how would she have entertained important clients? Not only that, but it would cause all sorts of difficulties in the locker room. They would probably want mirrors and hair dryers, not to mention doors on the showers. No, the very suggestion was preposterous.

Into this cloistered world had one day appeared David Llewellyn Evans, a young Welsh solicitor who had moved to the area with his wife, Megwyn, from North Wales. The firm had needed an assistant solicitor to handle matrimonial and court work particularly, and it was plain from his references that he had a great deal of experience in those areas.

The fact that he was from Wales was initially a slight deterrent to the deeply conservative partners of the firm, but he charmed them at his interview and they all readily agreed to take him on. Not only was he very personable, a very important quality in a service industry, but some felt that the fact that he was Welsh even added a touch of glamour to the firm’s image as well as serving to underline their commitment to equality and demonstrated how liberal they were. This was not a bad thing in the world of shifting sands in which they now practised.

Within a few years, Dai, as he was generally known, was the friendly, young face of the practice. In what seemed like no time at all, he was made a partner and prospered, moving to a bigger house to accommodate his growing family. As time went by, the firm had added more partners and Dai moved up the ladder in terms of seniority. As time had gone by, he had also grown more and more restless.

On this particular day, he was bored. It was Monday and there were two days to go before chukkas at the polo club. He consoled himself with the thought that he could go up to the club after work and have an hour or so stick and ball practice.

I must ensure, he thought, to ring the grooms to say he was coming so that they would have a couple of his horses ready for me. Although you could practice your swing and hitting the ball from a wooden horse, or even standing on a packing case, to do it on a real horse was preferable. This activity was described as ‘stick and balling’.

Dai was a handsome man, now in his thirties, with a winning smile and a gentle Welsh accent. By now, he had no further professional ambitions. He was locked into a lifestyle of his own making, a lifestyle of crushing predictability and respectability. In reality, he had only two aims. One was to play polo, and the other was to shag as many women as he could before he turned his toes up.

He adored women, but his true passion in life was for polo ponies. To paraphrase Kipling, his view was that a woman was just a woman, but a polo pony was a horse and both were placed at his disposal for riding at every opportunity.

As a partner in the venerable long-established firm, he could pretty much do as he pleased and since a large part of his work consisted of preparing wills for clients, he had an excellent excuse for absenting himself from the office and visiting people at home. This, of course, was not strictly necessary. As often as not, people would come to the office, but occasionally, if for example, somebody was house bound, he would go to their homes to see them and to take instructions for the preparation of the will. Also if a client was in business and couldn’t spare the time to get in to see him in his office, he would go to them. Naturally he would charge the client for such an attendance, but in fact he enjoyed getting out of the office and sometimes he used it as an excuse.

Thus it was that he had recently been visiting a doctor’s wife, ostensibly to take instructions for a will, but in reality to give her a good rogering on the living room floor. He smiled to himself when he recalled how, when one of his colleagues had asked him how much longer it would take him to finalise the matter, he had replied that he was pretty confident that a couple more visits should be sufficient to enable him to put things to bed. He smirked at his own wit and reflected that a couple of further visits would be more than enough for him. He was already bored by the doctor’s wife and he was now more interested in bedding Stella the local court shorthand writer who had a pair of thighs that made him go weak at the knees every time that he saw her.

He was not alone in that. When Stella was on duty, sitting impassively below the judge, typing away quietly on her machine, the court would slowly fill up with ardent admirers from the legal profession, who would sit, apparently waiting for their case to come on, but in reality admiring the comely form of the shorthand writer.

Before her arrival, the only person capable of exercising the same magnetic pull on the hardnosed advocates was a pretty little probation officer from Wales. Whenever she had been in court, there would be a similar increase in the population of advocates, all of whom wearing their most socially concerned expressions, would earnestly seek her views and listen in rapt attention as she answered them in her gentle Welsh lilt. Ordinarily they would not have the slightest interest in the little toe rag they were representing, but somehow, when this young lady was the probation officer in the case it was as if these hardened cynics had had a revelation like Saul on the road to Damascus and that they too had undergone a transformation and suddenly become more tender, loving and concerned.

It was quite comical to watch, in Dai’s opinion, or at least that was what he thought on the occasions when he himself was not first in the queue for the young woman’s attentions.

Stella’s arrival had changed all that. Since she had become the court shorthand writer, there had been a seismic shift in her favour and the probation officer, no longer the centre of attention had returned to Wales in disgust.

Dai roused himself from his reverie. He looked at the pile of files on his desk without any enthusiasm and sighed. If it was not for women and horses, he thought, life would be tedious indeed. Why work at all?

He knew well enough what the answer was. Money was always a concern. He had a wife and four young children to support with a large family home in a nice suburb. He also kept a string of polo ponies at a nearby club. One might reasonably have wondered how it was that he was able to pursue such an expensive sport on top of his other commitments.

He had, however, solved that problem some time ago. Over the years, he had simply persuaded all the little old ladies for whom he had made wills and for whom he was invariably an executor to include a gift to a charity in the will. The charity he always recommended was one which was dear to his own heart, not only because it was located in North Wales where he came from, but also because in reality he was the charity.

He had come up with the idea years before when, whilst administering the estate of a deceased client, he had paid out substantial legacies to various charities. Some of the charities concerned were large or very familiar, or both of those things, whilst others were relatively obscure and small.

He had realised that once the money was paid over nobody knew what happened to it. You sent a cheque to some charity or other and that was that. They spent it on whatever they wished and you had no right and no means of knowing what they spent it on. It was gone. It struck him as the perfect way of supplementing his income. Never one to waste time on idle introspection, he had set to work at once.

He realised that the British think more of their pets than people and that to be successful the so-called needy object of help would preferably be soft and cuddly or at least have fur of some kind, either that, or a lack of it. In fact, the scraggier, the better from the point of view of plucking at the heart strings. Rats would not do, he realised. Strange though when you thought about it because squirrels did not get the same bad press and were often called tree rats. When he considered it further, he concluded that it was probably the rats’ tails that set them apart. They could be quite endearing were it not for their tails which were, he had to concede, pretty repulsive. He looked carefully through the two inches thick tome that was the Directory of Charities for the UK.

God, he thought, it was enormous! What a business it was! It must be worth billions, all that money simply given away.

It really was a huge industry. That in a way might help. There were so many charities, many with a very high public profile. With luck nobody would notice his in the crowded world of those determined to press their good cause on the docile, soft-hearted and gullible public, some of whom in a fit of genuine compassion and others to exculpate their conscience would be persuaded to part up with their hard earned cash.

Virtually everything you could think of was already covered. There was no point in duplicating another charity, although there were numerous charities that did overlap one another, for example, for certain breeds of dog. As if one charity per breed was not enough! He, however, needed something original. He did not want there to be any competitors. He felt that if an existing charity got to hear about you and you were doing the same or similar things, then they might just look a little more closely at you, the competitor. He remembered one case he had dealt with of a rich testatrix who had died abroad leaving her entire estate to be divided between charities, both big and small and whereas the estate was in the process of being administered he had been surprised at the tenacity of the beneficiary charities and impressed by how determined they were to get their hands on every penny due to them.

This he most definitely did not want. He intended keeping a low profile. He was going to rely upon gifts by will from those he dealt with and who were daft enough to listen to him about those whom they should benefit on their death. After all, he reasoned the joy for the donor was in the giving and as far as he was concerned, he was helping them to gratify that urge.

He was, in fact, often asked by people about whether or not they should leave anything to charity and, if so, to whom? This tended to be women. Men were tighter and less susceptible to all things soft and cuddly unless it was a woman, in which case they were like lambs to the slaughter. There is no fool like an old fool, runs the old expression, and he could think of quite a few examples from his own experience of men who had been old enough to know better and yet who had not only left their entire estate to some young woman, usually from an impoverished country somewhere in the world, but also did so in the face of the perfectly reasonable expectations of their own flesh and blood, such as adult children of an earlier marriage or relationship. For this reason alone, contentious probate claims, that is to say the punch-up that happened after the death, were a useful source of work for lawyers like David.

Then, one day, he had an idea. He had been thinking about an address for the charity and had decided to use his aunt Bronwyn’s home in North Wales. She lived in Bethesda, a depressed mining village which no-one was ever likely to visit. It was a real dead and alive hole that had never seen better days and which the only remedy for, if you had had the misfortune to be born there, was to either die young or leave as soon as you could. He had done the latter. Certainly, it was far enough removed from the beaten track to make visits unlikely from the donating public.

Anyway, it was when he was idly reminiscing about his batty old aunt, who amongst other things made face cream from plant essences extracted from the plants in her garden, that he suddenly realised he had the answer. BATS!

He did not know if there were any there or not, but that did not matter because neither would anybody else. They flew at night time and were difficult to observe at the best of times.

All he needed to do was to put up a number of bat boxes around Bronwyn’s garden which covered about an acre, ostensibly for them to nest in and that would do it; some suitable photos for a pamphlet, courtesy of the Nature Section at the local library and ‘Bob’s your uncle’. He wasn’t actually. It was Bronwyn’s husband, Gwynfor Evans, but that didn’t matter. It was only a daft figure of speech.

He put together some tables to show the alarming decline of the bat population which he cobbled together from tables showing the decline of everything from newts to butterflies. He borrowed their keywords, habitat, loss, intensive farming, competing species, conserve and so on and simply applied them to his own intended beneficiary.

The Bethesda Bat Sanctuary was born.

He did not bother to register as a charity of course. You did not have to and anyway he was careful not to describe it as a charity. He just let people think it was. It was to be a society for the protection of the native species of bats, formed to do all it could to reverse the alarming decline in the bat population, attributed to loss of habitat and competition from other species for food. He had no idea whether or not any of that was true. It might be. When he came to think about it, he couldn’t remember when he had last seen a bat. He mentioned it to Bron when he asked if he could put up the boxes, that is he did not say anything about a charity, he simply asked her if she would mind if he put up some bat boxes in her trees for a sort of nature sanctuary. She did not mind. It seemed innocent enough and at least it did not have anything to do with women or horses, which she knew full well were his principal interests in life. So, Bronwyn’s garden became the Bethesda Bat Sanctuary and, unbeknown to her, the hub of the new quasi charity. Bron did not have to do anything. Over the years, she was not troubled by any of the donors because not only did David have a PO Box address at the local post office, set up by him to intercept and direct all mail to him, but the donors were, by definition, dead and thus unlikely to call or write.

He had done very well out of it over the years. It had funded his polo habit and he had a very nice sports car that he privately called the Bat mobile. God, he would often think, what a clever chap I am and witty too, as he swanned around on sunny days with the top down.

Amongst other things, it had also helped him pay maintenance for young Owen, the result of a passionate summer afternoon spent in the Nant Ffrancon valley with Mary, the local girl he loved and left. Actually, she was one of a considerable number, but she was the only one that he had cared for, or at least so he told himself. She had never married and still lived in Snowdonia in a small village called Llanberis. In reality, of course, all he cared about was David Llewellyn Evans. Well, that and polo.

After work, he had driven to the polo ground out in the country, set in green fields and far from any village or town. He always felt a thrill of excitement as he drove down the lane towards the ground and caught sight of the goal posts set at either end of the two polo fields. The club had two fields which were just that, expanses or grass unadorned by anything other than the goal posts at either end, and planking along the two long ends placed there to keep the ball in play.

A polo field is larger than most people think. They vary in size, but it is often the size of three football fields. The two playing teams consist of 4 players each and there should be two mounted umpires umpiring the match in progress. Even in friendly club clashes there will be one mounted umpire whose, sometimes, unenviable task is to determine whether or not a foul has been committed. This is not an easy task in such a fast moving game with eight riders milling around at any one time and where excited players frequently dispute the umpire’s call. Arguing with the umpire is strictly against the rules, but these rules in Dai’s experience were often not adhered to and unless the umpire was the sort who commanded respect both on the field and off, then there could be a bit of unpleasantness from time to time.

‘What are you, fucking blind?’ would constitute a fairly mild criticism in those circumstances as over-heated, over-sized egos kicked in.

In addition to the two playing fields, there was a stick and ball field, much smaller but with its own goal posts where practice chukkas could be held or where you would practice on your own or with friends.

Here you were supposed to warm up before a game rather than on the hallowed turf of the playing field itself, carefully cut, dressed and rolled for the game. It made sense, of course. Horses’ hooves, particularly in wet weather, soon made a mess of the turf which made play more difficult because the ball would strike a divot and bounce in an unpredictable way, or worse, take refuge in it and defy even the most determined efforts to dislodge it.

On arrival, he drove firstly to the pony lines where Mathias, one of the Argie grooms, had two horses ready for him and when he was ready to mount, held the horse and stirrups for him whilst he sprang into the saddle, whip and polo stick in hand.

Some of the Argentinian lads could leap into the saddle from the ground without using the stirrup. This he admired enormously. He would have loved to be able to show off by nonchalantly springing into the saddle but he didn’t dare try. A failure would be just too humiliating.

Likewise, some skilled riders could pluck a