Beetles, Bananas and Up, Up and Away!

Early morning; grabbed my dish and with Holly, Jones and Star in hot pursuit, headed for the garden. Purely by luck and by jumping over the lead dog did I make it to the fruit before our three, self-confessed strawberry addicts plunged their snouts inside the foliage. Managed to scrabble up half a dozen berries, but Holly got the biggest and reddest, Jones the most because he’s little and quick and then came Star – good at lifting and chasing off robbers, but somewhat lacking in the brains department, he got none. So I gave him one of mine and now contented, the four of us went back inside for a hearty breakfast.

Filled their bowls with biscuits and other bits and my own with nuts, raisins, Weetbix, bran flakes, muesli, natural yogurt, teaspoonful of honey, chopped banana and, last but never least, my impoverished pile of little strawberries. The dogs gave me their best ‘no fair’ stare and held back on the biscuits, begrudging me my berries.

Anyway, I ignored their slavering, flooded my dish with cold milk and hefted my spoon, ready for breaking through the half-inch thick, yogurt permafrost, but all was not as it seemed.

Where the yogurt ended and the bananas, like calving icebergs stuck up through the slurry, something lived and waved its arms in earnest. Got my glasses and peered into my dish. Clinging desperately to a strawberry, a single, tiny beetle prayed for a fair wind to carry him shoreward. Adrift in that arctic sea of iced milk he stood little chance of survival; with every tremor from my tabletop, waves proportionally the size of two-storey houses lashed his makeshift lifeboat and, had I not seen them, both lifeboat and beetle would have gone the way of the underlying bran flakes, straight to my stomach.

Plastered to my fingertip he went back out to the garden and on the highest sunflower seed head he stood, stretched and began the process of washing down. For that next half hour I watched him preen, clean and brush away his yogurt suit. Soon, he composed himself and then, without so much as a nod or a wave for saving his life, flipped open his cleansed wing casings and blasted off – up into the sky.

He managed twenty feet before a swallow took him. Could have saved myself the bother and eaten the ungrateful bastard myself.

 

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 Another excerpt... ‘Up, Up and Almost Away!’

... For half a crown, Gilbert would, without so much as a second thought captain a papier-mâché submarine to hell and back, so test flying Spitfire One was looked upon as little more than a flap and grunt down the hill outside Bob’s house, but first the money – or no deal. Reluctantly, Bob dug around inside his pocket and pulled out a bright, shining, almost new half crown piece, thrust it into Gilbert’s outstretched palm and threatened death as a minimum punishment should he fail to get our plane airborne. Gilbert promised his best effort and pocketed the coin. He donned his borrowed mining helmet and lowered himself inside Spitfire One’s flimsy fuselage.

‘I am ready,’ he rasped and took a firm hold on his bamboo crash bar.

It was early morning, the sun was big and yellow and a slight east wind was blowing head-on to runway two-niner. Other than the sound of straining little legs on old pedals and the rumble of overloaded roller skates, there was nothing. I pulled, Junior pushed and Gilbert’s eyes flew wider as the wind speed under his eyelids climbed to maximum velocity...

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Flight of Fancy?

I keep looking for the summer; a long, hot day or two, some reassurance, maybe sunburn even, but nothing yet. The rain just keeps on raining, the ground, where I can find a piece that isn’t flooded feels as though it’s floating on marmalade. Everything is sodden; swallows huddle as soggy twos and threes along the telephone wires and stare listlessly back along the route they have just travelled. Five thousand miles from sun to no sun; doesn’t make sense, why not stay where you are and save yourself the bother?

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From a little boy’s life, an excerpt...

... Bob’s house trebled as command headquarters, watering hole and storage centre for egg collections, fishing rods and air rifles, but this particular day we needed none of those. This day would be dedicated to the building of our first and only piloted aeroplane; Spitfire One.

Took us three days, from the original schematics done in the sand, to the final painting-on of her Air Force roundels. We built the frame from bamboo canes hacked from Bob’s garden; the wings and fuselage were covered in greaseproof paper and suitably ‘doped’.
‘We must be crazy,’ I told them, but my pointing this out fell on deaf ears. Come hell or high water, Spitfire One would bear its fearless pilot aloft, or at least glide him sedately across the lawn to the far side of the garden.
‘We need an undercarriage.’
‘What’s an undercarriage?’
‘Wheels to go underneath or it won’t move.’
We all agreed; wheels were a good idea, so back inside the house we galloped and ten minutes later emerged with two sets of roller skates, old Beano books, loads of Sellotape and balls of thick string. Another hour and Spitfire One had her undercarriage.
‘What next?’
‘Who’s going first?’
No one spoke. Squirming and headshaking we all declined the offer of test pilot. The fun had been in the building, the terror we knew, was in the flying.
‘We’ll draw straws,’ Junior piped, ‘those with long straws will be the ground crew – the one with the shortest straw will fly.’
Four straws were brought from the pantry; scissors were found, used, and the modified straws held out at arm’s length.
‘Take one.’ Junior looked at the rest of us and the rest of us recoiled in horror.
‘It won’t fly,’ I warned them. ‘We’re all too heavy.’
Everyone nodded, apart from Willie.
‘It might if it goes downhill.’
We all looked outside; Spitfire One, like a one-winged, no-engine Spirit of St Louis stood waiting in the sunlight, her Beano book double undercarriage with silver-coloured skates now ready for the runway. Midway between her front and rear bogies, a hole had been left where the pilot could sit.
‘Forget it. I’m not doing this.’ I folded my arms and glowered at Willie. ‘You think it will fly so you do it.’
Willie dropped his eyes to the floor.
‘It’s late. My food will be ready.’ He stood up. ‘If I’m not there on time the dog gets it.’ He disappeared through the front door. For the next three days no one saw him.
‘Gilbert.’ Bob suggested. ‘He’s thin and little enough to get in.’
‘What if he won’t?’
‘Then I’ll rat on him and my mother will sack him.’
Bob’s eyes glowed; Gilbert was the cook’s son, in the holidays he worked in the garden. At four feet nothing and weighing half of one of us he was the ideal trainee pilot. We could see him; almost insect-like, whippet-slim and unsuspecting, outside in the garden, watering flowers and whistling. A good puff of wind and he would disappear over the fence. We all stood up and went outside to convince Gilbert that his imminent promotion to test pilot would be his first, tentative step on the corporate ladder...

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Things Are Brighter Now!

Hi everyone, my wife and commander has just finished brightening up my blog. I like it – easier on the eyes and when all’s said and done, the old quote ‘a change is as good as a rest’ always rings true. The elephant background served me well but had become somewhat tiresome and sombre looking, so here we go with a fresh start; hopefully, the writing matches up.

Something about a little boy’s travels springs to mind...

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A small leap forward with An English Boy’s Wanderings in Africa...

 ... Took me quite some time to settle in at Mashaba Primary School, but now I had friends, three of them and as a unit, the four of us became inseparable. After school, we met at Bob’s house; me, Bob, Willie and Junior, plus three Persian cats, an owl chick called Spook who always wanted feeding and whatever else we had taken into custody, rescued or traumatised via various methods of capture. Then there was Bob’s Grandmother, Granny Fleming; a dour, but lovely, grey-haired Scot who sergeant-majored the Sunshine Club on a Tuesday afternoon. Religious instruction had long since become her forte. Bob’s Mum played the piano and trotted out her music for us to infect with our singing. Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam and My Cup is Full and Running Over were hot favourites; and if sung with fervour would guarantee a sneak peek into Heaven, or at least give access to Granny Fleming’s homemade lemonade and rock buns festooned with raisins, cream and finally, a dollop of Granny’s strawberry jam with the strawberries still in it – so we all sang our little hearts out, devoured the buns and lemonade and piled into the front room for fear of missing Superman on the radio...

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A Short, Though Very Welcome Break!

My apologies for the unannounced leave of absence – I needed a break from computer screens and storytelling, so went for walks and too many pub lunches. Kicked a ball with the kids and talked with my wife about anything other than writing; looked at spring flowers, the rain on stone walls and miles of open moorland, all the things that normal people do. Anyway, I’m back behind my pc and already the wheels are grinding. Balance has gone through the window and that maddening, right eye tic has resurrected; all is as it was – time for that little boy in Africa to get on with his story...

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An excerpt:

So every Friday night we trundled clubwards in our now, sun-faded, patchy-black Morris Minor. Dad even used the same parking space; we were conforming. Like other Friday-nighters, we would climb out from our car and crunch across the gravelled car park, lured like mindless moths for glass-panelled, overly curtained front doors. Some people said hello and some didn’t. Once inside we were absorbed then ignored. People talked, drank and waited en masse for the draw; that magical ten pound note was all that mattered.

For thirty miles in any direction, this was it – a weekly high point contrived by company hierarchy to keep the workers happy. This was mining life, Rhodesia style; as long as the beer stayed cold and the crisps crunchy, no one gave a toss. An hour later and our usual legless, master of ceremonies shouted for quiet and spun his company workshop manufactured, lottery drum – steel thick enough to fend of Howitzer shells, shaft mounted and held in place by two pillar block bearings, it would, if allowed to, remove several fingers with one, single spin.

The drum slowed, with every pair of wanton eyeballs glued to it. Incantations were whispered, prayers said, coughs stifled and lucky coins were clutched and fiddled with. Like some giddy, fairground ride it rocked to a standstill. Wing nuts were slipped from a steel access door and in went the hand of fate.

‘Number thirty nine – Missus Oberholtzer!’

Silence. Everyone held their breath. To claim the money you had to be there – in the club. Relieved sniggers. Save for waiters bringing drinks, no one moved. The Oberholtzers were missing.

‘Spin it again, she’s not here!’

So he stuck back the lid and for a second nail-biting time, spun the killer drum. ‘Number 8 – Mister and Missus Whittam!’

Mother shrieked, spilled her drink and stabbed me with her cigarette – albeit, accidently. Up went her hand.

‘That’s me!’

Like a tornado she made for the stage to claim her ten quid. My dad sort of tried to shrink and when I grinned at him, pretended we weren’t related. My ear throbbed from the fag burn.

Mother collected her winnings, promised half to my dad, told me to rub some spit on my ear and waved for the waiter. Dad disappeared back to the bar; I could hear him singing Nellie Dean because he was rich now, and because it was Friday night...

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Unpredictable April!

April’s mixed weather bag has definitely been turned upside down and given a good shake. Within the space of one week we have had rain, sleet, hail and small splatterings of very welcome sunshine; my greenhouse is slowly losing its grey, lifeless demeanour and is gradually, but purposefully, most definitely, going green. Time to get in there and hunker down amongst the grow bags and slug pellets. Think it’s a man thing; sheds and greenhouses are pretty much related and the vast majority of us males love them both; sheds, with their pot-bellied stoves in winter, and greenhouses with their pot-bellied men in summer – often encouraged by a beer or two hidden amongst the tomato plants.

However, labouring over nature’s fecundity does have its downside. Pests, alien spores and death-by-damp watch from the shadows; thrips, mites and things that make your leaves curl, flock like vultures to a lion kill. Within a day, all can be lost and, considering my ease of access to rows of thripless supermarket shelves, I often wonder why I do it. But never, not ever, will I abandon the quest for red-ripe, greenhouse-grown tomatoes and cucumber jungles.

After all, where else can a man pretend to work, drink his beer and dream...?

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An English Boy’s Wanderings in Africa: another little bit of...

... By my mother and mother’s growing circle of other mothers, Friday nights were eagerly looked forward to; that one night a week when the mundanity of holding together family life was forgotten. Husbands were corralled in the club bar and could be spied on via the waiters’ serving hatch, or waved at for another round of drinks. Children of semi-responsible age had two bob thrust in their hands and were then sent outside to ‘go and play’.

Two bob got me two cokes and two packets of chips (crisps). Kids were seen as little people who wandered into the cocktail bar for one more sixpence and hourly check over’s, but I wasn’t the smallest kind of a kid anymore. That following year I would be twelve years old and like a grown pig for the spit, I was ready for Alcatraz – boarding school. Fort Victoria High School, stuffed with trembling, homesick wannagohomers, cold showers, lonely hostel matrons and sadistic hairy men, torturously intent on flaying every boy within range of the birch. But that’s another story; six months time was a still a long, long way off and I duly made the most of my freedom.

Sat on the club steps with my second coke and first packet of chips, I was suddenly alone. The other kids had legged it and watched with full grins from the safety of the flower beds.

‘You’re the boy in the Morris Minor?’

I looked up and nodded, more out of fear than politeness.

‘Your mother came for the draw then?’

Another nod. My fingers closed and crushed my chips; the rest of me refused to move. I had been loomed over by the giantess from hell; the lady with the lookalike blood splatters all around her dress.

‘You mustn’t sit too long on the steps, you know.’

‘Why not?’ I croaked.

‘The spiders will get you.’

‘Spiders?’

‘Big ones with red hair.’

‘Red hair?’

The giantess nodded her head. ‘Like the one climbing onto your shoe.’

I left her on the steps, along with my coke, my chips and a spider big enough to push-start our Morris Minor...

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With Murderous Intent!

Talpidae, or moles as we commoners call them, can kick up mayhem aplenty beneath our emerald lawns; digging, chewing and slashing in hot pursuit of earthworms, which, through toxins in the mole’s saliva are immobilised and stored in underground caches of up to a thousand. What once was level and pristine ground is quickly changed to semi lunar landscape. Mini volcanic mounds spring up overnight and flowers droop because their roots have been bulldozed off. Tunnel networks to challenge the London Underground spread through the entire garden and Jones, our four-legged digger-upperer, with much glee, is becoming obsessed with the dig of the century.

In retaliation, I have borrowed some traps from our farmer neighbour and already been sent to hell by my kids.

‘Murderer!’ they called me; along with, ‘mole killer’, ‘animal batterer’ and a dozen other names to match my heinous crime of protecting our garden. However, I went ahead with eradication plan A, and, when the boys were asleep, snuck outside with my spade and extermination kit.

With my lamp on low burn and me looking somewhat like a Victorian grave-robber, I set about the task of ‘demolerisation’. Six molehills were selected, six holes were dug and six traps were primed, semi-buried and covered with grass sods. Ripper-like, I sneaked back inside, hid my muddy willies and, whilst still smiling triumphantly, fell asleep in front of the telly.

Holly, one of our Labradors woke me up at six this morning; covered in lab-slobber I made myself a cup of coffee and went to sit in the loo for half an hour.

‘Got the bastards!’ I whispered gleefully and then rubbed my hands together in anticipation of six, abundantly filled traps.

The first five traps, though sprung, were empty. In the last I found a neatly folded sheet of paper – upon it, scribbled in black ink, were the words, ‘Hasta la vista, Baby!!’

I didn’t look round, but knew the kids were watching from their upstairs bedroom window.

It was with the dignity befitting an English back-woodsman that I took up my guttering lamp, spade, and empty traps and went inside...

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That Boy, again – an excerpt...

... It came at my father with wide, reptilian eyes and a guttural hiss that frightened mother from the kitchen. I fell backwards – hit my head on the kitchen wall, shouted out a ‘B’ word and then, started to laugh. Mother’s ‘poison-spitter’ was in fact, a flea-ridden, ash-covered, half-starved Siamese kitten.

Dad dropped his hooker-outerer and, slack-mouthed stared down at his refugee. Mother discarded her cigarette and scooped up ‘poor little Cinders’ before dad had chance to say we couldn’t keep it. So we kept it. Cinders of the Dover Stove; like a phoenix she had literally risen from the ashes, a bright and comforting addition to all our lives.

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The days in Mashaba dribbled past, but the excitement of Friday draw night was always looked forward to. Double bonus for mother; Friday night was also logged as Library night, along with that one in a hundred chance to win ten quid. The library was sort of a bunker style arrangement, tagged to the side of the Mine Club. To mother and mother’s friends it was a place of solace, a womanly refuge where men never ventured; who needed books when a bar filled with beer stayed open as long as its patrons stayed upright. Often, I stood outside and waited for dad to finish his tenth bottle of beer and customary, Nellie Dean before he emerged to take us home; fag between his lips, bitching like hell as to why he had left Mother England in the first place, car keys pointed with belligerent intent at our dutiful Morris Minor.

The draw-master always did his thing roundabout nine o’clock. Any earlier and the club would empty; once the tenner had been won and lost, most people rounded up their kids, picked up their basket of assorted drinks and crisps, then headed homewards for a fun-filled night with Jim Reeves.

For ten minutes, thirty cars revved up, moved if their drivers were capable and, as a convoy of weaving, wobbling tail lights, evaporated into an asbestos-laden night...

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A Power of Good!

Being the evil, scheming parents that we are, the Boss and me have successfully coerced our teenage boys into restoring their bedrooms from leprous cess-pits to clean and smell-free dens in two days. Some achievement, you might well say? Admittedly, mistress bribery had to be commandeered and our pain, from forking out vast sums of money has yet to ease.

Sky+ boxes and high-def flat screens are now in both boys’ bedrooms and, dare I say, not a single coke can, smelly sock or antique burger crust is anywhere to be seen. However, for both siblings, there came with the deal a sting in the tail – the flat-screens were financed via their own burgeoning, momentarily unlocked bank accounts and for their promised commitment to responsible ownership, we stumped up the cash for their satellite boxes and associated bits and pieces; a goodly amount once the dust had settled.

Astounded by the transformation, we now knock before entering their adult-style dens and have sworn never to touch their tellies. Amazing how possession through the use of personal finance can change a young man’s view of his now expanding world. A little taste of adult-angst evolved of cash investment seems to have done them both a power of good...

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An English Boy’s Wanderings in Africa – just an excerpt...

... Mother, with her back pressed firmly against the kitchen wall, looked on; nerves steeled by double-strength drags on her cigarette. Dad had found himself a suitable piece of fencing wire and, after a few modifications, now brandished a long, hooking-out type instrument.

He went down on all fours; eyes level with the firebox and, with his breath held, worked his wire hook amongst a pile of old cinders.

‘Be careful it’s not a snake,’ mother warned him and moved another step further away from the stove. I tried to look inside and got shouted at; promised the ‘flat of my dad’s hand’ if I didn’t get out of the way.

‘Could be one of those spitters,’ mother proffered, ‘mind your eyes for God’s sake, one squirt of poison and you’ll never see again.’

‘Maybe we should just leave it where it is,’ said dad, not so brave anymore.

Can’t say I blamed him, running round the kitchen with a six foot length of spitting cobra wrapped around his head wouldn’t have gone down very well; with any of us.

‘Let me have a go.’ I held out my hand for the snagging wire, but once again, got glowered at.

‘In the glove box; there’s a torch. Bring it for me.’

I ran to the car and dug out an old Bulls-eye bicycle lamp.

‘The battery’s nearly flat,’ I told him, but he took it anyway and directed a beam of failing light into the dark throat of our Dover Stove.

‘Eyes,’ said dad, ‘two of them.’

‘How many eyes do snakes have?’ I asked in all innocence and got a slap round the legs from my mother...

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