Excerpts from
The Day My Uncle Kulle Went Mad
By Kim Fupz Aakeson
“I’ve
tended this garden and looked after it, and I’ve weeded it and trimmed the
edges of the lawn with a pair of hand shears, and I’ve pinched and pulled and
nipped, and it’s the most magnificent garden in the whole of this highly
respectable road, and so you, you old goat, aren’t going to settle yourself up
there and spoil it all.”
"Oh, for heavens’
sake just let him sit up there and mind his own business,” said my mother
finally. “I just can’t be bothered listening to you carrying on any longer with
all that gardening nonsense...”
Carrying on?”
shouted my father. “Perhaps it’s me running around and sitting up on people’s
roofs? So I’m the one who’s daft, well now I know.”
He went on tramping
round and round and shouting and when he grew tired of doing that, he took his
lawn-mower and mowed the whole lawn simply out of bad temper.”
"This family’s just
not all there,” he said every time he had finished a length. “Simply not all
there...”
I stood and watched
Uncle Kulle up on the roof, but doing that soon became boring, as he simply sat
there with his eyes closed in the sunshine.
"Aren’t you going to
have anything to eat?” I asked.
No, thank you,”
said Uncle Kulle. “Rhododendrons don’t eat anything, but I wouldn’t mind being
watered now and then.”
"I’ll see to that,”
I said, and then I watered him gently with the garden hose until he was wet
through, and he rather liked that.
"Thank you, my boy,”
he said.
He’s stark raving
mad,” shouted my father down from the runner beans. Now he had started weeding
the whole of the kitchen garden. “And this is my tool shed, and in this garden
I’m the one to decide who’s going to be planted where!”
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
|
|
