Profanity & Little Bridges!

Had a short email from one of my readers, a sort of thank you note for writing a reasonably clean book. I know there’s sex, but there has to be – even in the eighteen nineties people ‘did it’. However, profanity and sex beyond the norm just leaves me cold – don’t see the point in lewd descriptions, or maybe it’s me? The odd four-letter word in the right place can bring a story to life, too many and the story falls apart. Better to leave some things locked away in your personal cupboard of private imaginings. Stick with Occam’s Razor – less is more.

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A modified extract from An English Boy’s Wanderings...

 

... Down went our little car for what the Rhodesian authorities defined as a low-level bridge, which in reality meant the bridge was too small;  for that, read: wide enough for one vehicle.  And for chrissakes don’t be halfway across when a thirty ton, trailer-dragging Oshkosh is coming the other way – or when the river’s flooding. Neither of these would be good – especially if one is of a nervous disposition.

‘What in God’s name is that!’

‘A bridge, my darling.’

Mother waggled her fag at the windscreen. ‘I meant the name, dearest. Not the death trap we’re about to drive over.’

Dad got his lips around the pronunciation, Umzingwani River.

The bridge was a long one; a sort of tarred strip on concrete legs – trees jammed underneath, left there by the last flood. The water was brown, deep enough to hide crocodiles and other boy-biting creatures. Mother stayed quiet. I think she held her breath all the way across. Then we rose up, phoenix-like and crested the far bank.

‘Goes all the way down to join up with the Limpopo,’ said Mother, with what was now her favourite map pressed against her knees. ‘And there’s another big river just before we reach Mashaba.’

I craned my neck and tried to read the names.

‘What is it called?’

‘The Lundi,’ mother chirruped, pleased with her map reading. Her cigarette wriggled south-eastwards over the paper. ‘Then it joins up with the Sabi down here in the corner.’ She folded the map and shoved it under the dashboard, for the time being satisfied with her discoveries.

The clouds had turned a sort of, ripe plum colour. I watched them boiling up in front. Outside our car nothing moved. Trees hung their leaves straight down and dead still. Just the drone of our little engine hummed through the quiet.

‘We’re coming into some rain.’

Mother thought it necessary to lean as far forward as possible and peer upwards through the top edge of the windscreen – just as sixty zillion gigawatts of lightning blatted the sky. For the second time that day mother screamed, banged her head and bust her cigarette. But onwards we went; our little Morris like a bedraggled spaniel bounded through the puddles and with barely glowing headlights took us through and eventually, out of the storm. From almost pitch blackness to bright, roasting sunlight in a matter of minutes. The strips steamed, the trees glittered and again the sky was there, that limitless, egg-shell blue above us.

‘God, that was terrifying!’ mother blurted. ‘Is it always like that?’ As if my father knew.

I looked back over a tissue box and oranges piled against the window. Like a black, demonic wall the storm chased after us then swung sideways and sulked away to the south east. In front, like some outdoor sauna the road steamed on and on and on; up and down from river to river. When I wound my window down the smell of rain and rich red earth rushed in at me...

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