We didn’t get corn circles in Cricklewood. You need corn. This left us marginalised from the great summer debate, and glum. For urban life is short on magic, and even mystery is brief: you usually conclude, after a bit, that it wasn’t the fairies who nicked your milk, nor a warlock’s curse that flattened your battery. Likewise, few midnight knocks betoken a time-warped Saracen or a basketful of royal foundlings; it is generally a minicabbie looking for Fulham.
What envy, then, we felt, down here, for lucky rural folk! We, too, wanted to squat in moonlit fields, craning to catch Titania treading a measure in the cereal, or listening out for a tinny voice to cry: ‘We mean you no harm, Earthlings, see we bring Venusian toffees, and humorous T-shirts for your emir!’ Even a hoaxer would have left a welcome hiccup on the flat oscillograph of our lives: what fun to have sprung out on Jeremy Beadle, just as he finished rolling his bogus circumference, and thrashed him to within an inch of his life!
But it was not to be. The corn got cut, the winter came, the country people snuggled happily beneath their thatch to dream of next season’s yet weirder phenomena, and, down here, we ground our jealous teeth and reconciled ourselves to puzzling out, instead, the mystery of the single currency. It may not have come from Pluto or Cloud-cuckoo-land, but it was as close as we were ever going to get.
Until this morning. This morning, I looked out from an upper window on to a lawn thick with hoar-frost. Pretty enough, but that was not what made the heart lurch: for there, etched into the twinkling rime, was a huge circle, so impeccable as to suggest a 10ft set of compasses. No tracks led to it, nor any away; though shortly, as you may imagine, mine did both. I was on the lawn in a trice.
They were the footprints of a gigantic hound! Was this the fabled corn circle of the Baskervilles? Alas no; I peered closer, freezing a knee: these could not belong to any dog. No dog has a heel and five toes. Then again, no human being has a foot two inches long. And then even more again, what beast, be it canine or human, can materialise in the middle of a large lawn, leaving no trace of its passage thither, impress a perfect circle, and vanish as trackless as it came?
I ran back into the house, and up to the attic. You know the kind of box: it always has The Coral Island in it, and Kennedy’s Shortbread Eating Primer, a few dead bees, and right at the bottom, Tracking Made Easy, which some dumb uncle bought you 40 years ago because he thought you might need to identify spoor left in your parent’s fifth-floor flat, could be an okapi, funny place, Cockfosters.
So I took it outside, and I knelt again, with the book open at British mammals, and you would not believe the variety of feet that walk upon England’s mountains green, but when it came to what had walked upon Cricklewood’s garden white, nothing. As far as Capt. John Wills-Bourne, late of the Selous Scouts, was concerned, this footprint did not exist.
So I telephoned the Natural History Museum.
‘It is most probably,’ said the NHM woman, in that gentle but firm voice so often employed when talking to the deranged, ‘a hedgehog circle. This is how they feed.’
‘It is not a hedgehog’s print,’ I said, ‘and even if it were, the hedgehog would be the size of a bulldog. Anyway, how could it leave no track but the circle?’
‘It might,’ said the woman, ‘be a stoat or similar dropped by an owl. If it was hurt, it might have run in a circle until the owl retrieved it.’
I consulted Tracking Made Bloody Impossible again, to be certain.
‘It is not a stoat,’ I insisted, ‘nor similar. And whatever it is, an owl could not have picked it up. A condor possibly, but this is Cricklewood.’
‘If you fax us a photo,’ sighed the woman, ‘we’ll try to identify it.’
So I went upstairs for the camera, and the sun was now streaming through the landing window; which I thought no more about, until I was back on the lawn. The frost had gone. The circle with it.
Theories c/o The Times on a postcard please. And country folk need not apply. They’ve had their turn.