Part one of a short story, the Sussex pub game Toads, the local church roof is callously stripped, incompetence, character assassinations, indignation, in a fast-moving tragi-comic yarn in two parts. Set in the fictitious village of Denham and Lewes, East Sussex.
by Chris Harris
Original artwork by Louise Turner.
Podcast about the story etc.
Toads
In Sussex villages, people tended to tolerate eccentricity, low-level criminality and public drunkenness with remarkable patience. What they did not tolerate, however, was anybody interfering with three sacred institutions: the pub, the church, or the Game of Toads.
Toads is a traditional Sussex pub game, virtually unheard of anywhere else, but regarded highly and almost piously by its devotees. This local passion is so strong that Lewes, the county town of East Sussex, hosts an annual World Toad Championship. Normally, it is treated much like an inter-pub darts competition: an almost ritual evening fixture, accompanied by a few beers and plenty of local rivalry. Unlike darts, however, it does not attract international television coverage. The game itself involves throwing heavy brass discs onto an old lead-topped table, scoring one point for landing on the table and two points if the disc drops cleanly into the hole at the centre.
In Denham, at The Red Lion pub, brothers Lee and Charlie Chivers ruled the local toad’s scene, captaining the renowned Red Lion Toads to repeated local success and bringing immense pride to the village, when they won the World Toad Championship in 2023. A mixture of their skill at the game, their criminal records and previous prison sentences meant the now-supposedly reformed Chivers brothers were known throughout the area simply as ‘The Toads’.
It has been the sad lot of the traditional English vicar in more recent years, on rare occasions, to suddenly hear the drip-drip of water during heavy rain. This is the surefire sign that an area of the roof has been stripped bare of its lead. Lead thieves target flat roofs towards the back of churches, normally over the vestry, where they cannot be seen, and therefore have more time to carefully and quietly go about the art of their crime, under the disapproving gaze of God in heaven.
So it was at Denham Catholic Church. After a particularly dry patch during the summer, the rains came down, and that unmistakable heavy leaking could be heard. In this case, it resembled a torrent of water, its sound commensurate with the vast amount of lead stripped from above the belfry. It was not just a strip of lead; it was a whole roof covering. The thieves had left the lead in situ on the edges, so it remained undetected, until the first subsequent downpour because the rest of the roof was not visible from anywhere in the village. A highly successful heist. The getaway weeks before the discovery.
In a small village like Denham, it felt like an affront to everyone, a besmirching of their own personal habitat. Everyone felt it personally. For that week, it was the talk of the village. And as is customary with villages, the customary gossip and the throwing around of allegations. Whenever a small criminal act occurs in Denham, the blame falls on the Toads.
Sergeant Briggs, from Lewes Police, was summoned by Roger Munnery, the vicar. A lazy copper, during the five-minute drive, he prepared his usual plethora of excuses for doing nothing. The Police are poorly funded these days and limited in what crimes they can pursue. But some forces are also handicapped by low-grade, lazy operatives like Briggs, anxious for retirement, the pension, also keen to do as little as possible to deserve it.
‘Thing is, vicar, it has been dry for the last three weeks, so it is impossible to pinpoint when the crime occurred. What am I supposed to do?’ Roger was prepared for this. He had long been a shoulder to cry on for parishioners who had fallen victim to the sort of petty crimes Briggs simply could not be bothered with. Briggs was the local police force’s short straw, a man seemingly assigned to inertia and incompetency itself.
‘But don’t worry, we’ll put it on our social media feeds, and I’ll get a crime prevention officer to visit you with some ideas to stop it from happening again,’ He felt chuffed with himself and his performance. Roger sported his understanding face hiding his real contempt for the officer.
‘Haven’t you forgotten something officer?’ Roger asked him curtly
‘Erm…oh, of course, the crime reference number.’ Briggs felt stupid. A large proportion of policing was simply offloading problems onto insurance companies. Providing a crime reference number essentially meant giving the go-ahead for reimbursement of material losses — it was Briggs’ pièce de résistance. He always felt he was doing the victim a favour and enjoyed this part of the routine. However, he had forgotten the number in his rush to get back to the station, put his feet up, and read the paper.
Driving back to Lewes, he passed the entrance to Pear Tree Farm; this is where the Toads lived and worked as labourers. They shared a static caravan encased in one of the huge open barns. An illegal set-up and arrangement with the farmer, all cash in hand and inside the barn to avoid any detection from any prying authority in the air who may demand planning permissions, rates and other ungodly punitive measures like income tax. Briggs knew, as it was a bank holiday morning, the Toads would be in and that they were the only local people worth talking to, but he couldn’t be bothered. He told himself there was no evidence, and he would therefore be perceived as victimising them. Bad policing came with a textbook of poor excuses, modern cultural insensitivities being a perfect foil for due diligence.
It was midday, and the Toads were already ensconced in The Red Lion, playing toads and drinking their favoured Harvey’s tipple from the local brewery. The pub was lively with bank holiday drinkers. As word of the theft spread, fast and furious banter was directed at the brothers — mostly friendly, though turning sour from a few of the less-enlightened clientele. After a long afternoon of drinking, they left to continue downing cans and practising toads on their makeshift board inside the barn. Twelve hours of drinking and playing toads made for a perfect day.
Pub banter is never known for its ingenuity, or indeed its subtlety, and the brothers had quickly grown heartily sick of the endless jokes about the lead, and whether the pub had simply added a locally sourced and fresh layer to it. It had been mildly amusing for the first few days, but it still took nearly a month before they managed an entire evening in The Red Lion without someone making a reference to it.
The brothers were regulars and much liked by Martin, the landlord, largely because they spent most of their wages on Harvey’s, and generally kept themselves to themselves. As accusations began to circulate around the village, Martin repeatedly defended them. In his years behind the bar, he had known plenty of genuine wrong ’uns, and he simply did not believe the Chivers brothers were responsible.
More importantly, he knew their devotion to toads. So, two months after the church lead stripping, when the pub itself was broken into, and a large collection of vintage brass and copper decorations stolen, along with the toads board, seemingly for scrap metal, Martin found it impossible to believe the brothers had anything to do with it. Whatever else they may once have been, he could not imagine them depriving themselves of their nightly entertainment.
Sergeant Briggs divvied out the crime reference number and the sad news that, for Sussex Police, scrap metal smelting was an area of crime so secret that the resources to penetrate this shady world simply were not available.
‘Absolutely useless tosser,’ Martin remarked, under his breath, to his chef. Briggs caught the tosser part, but pretended he hadn’t, as he knew that this was exactly what he was, and charging someone with insulting a police officer would involve paperwork. Let lazy and sleeping dogs lie.
Driving past the church, he noted that his friend’s local Lewes building firm, George Deakin and Sons, was carrying out the roof repair. He felt a sense of pride that his allocation of a crime reference number and his judgment to do so were the green light for the work, and he felt almost evangelical in his generosity and judgment.
George Deakin was a well-known local figure. He had, famously, a few years ago, foiled a bank robbery in Lewes High Street by tackling the miscreants, whom he single-handedly disarmed. He was rightly branded a hero at the time, but had used his fame to espouse his far-right-wing views whenever crime was mentioned on the Lewes Facebook Group. He’d well and truly used up his credits for his bravery, but everyone continued to never challenge his extreme views, such as public flogging, as he morphed from local hero to local nutter.
Next week: the concluding part 2
Also: Custard, Crumble And The Roobarb Punch. Part 1
The Rights of Fans. 