Jacket Woman

Set in the England of Queen Victoria the story focuses on my great, great grand aunt Martha, the fifth of nine children born to rural blacksmith Moses Attridge and his wife Ellen.

In a time of burgeoning technology people struggled with life’s complexities. Martha fought desperately for survival in a world she barely understood and had little expectation of influencing. Victorian nobles, landowners and wealthy merchants constituting the Ruling Classes, squabbled over bloodlines, real estate and commodities, while people like Martha and her family went unheeded. Attempts to improve a person’s own lot generally meant working ‘in service’ or the lower levels of administration, or enlisting in the military. Serial foreign wars drained the nation’s lifeblood, while the sparse rights of ordinary folk were continually eroded by the demands of a bloated and increasingly unmanageable British Empire.

In the story, Martha’s oldest sister Miriam, a lively young woman with idyllic dreams of motherhood, falls ill and dies from tuberculosis, known then as consumption. Their mother sinks into a morbid depression and it devolves to next-oldest daughter Frances to tend the invalid, ultimately becoming woman of the house when Ellen dies.

Frances performs dutifully but marries out of the dispiriting situation at the earliest opportunity, her household obligations transferring to Martha. The demanding Moses insists Martha’s twin sister Nell helps with the drudgery of household chores and the care of three infant siblings. The young teenage twins become increasingly wayward, a state of affairs Moses tries to correct by taking a new wife—the haughty Rebecca; a woman thirteen years his junior.

By the time Rebecca conceives a child the defiant Martha has also managed to get pregnant, but stoically refuses to implicate the child’s father.  While Rebecca’s baby thrives Martha’s child dies of what Moses reports as ‘a gastric disorder’.

Tension in the home builds. Again Martha gets pregnant, and Moses throws her out to have the baby at the notorious Reigate Union Workhouse. Nell is also discovered to be pregnant, earning Moses’ wrath and her own place at the workhouse. Unmarried mothers there are customarily separated from newborns and made to wear a garish yellow jacket as a mark of shame. They are ‘Jacket Women’.

Readily giving up her baby Nell is allowed to return home. Martha grabs her child and escapes, and after a dismal hand-to-mouth slog finds work as a domestic servant in Eastbourne, a fashionable coastal resort some miles away. Thus begins her new life.

(Though she never married, Martha went on to have three more children).

SCENE ONE: Nutfield

Moses Attridge swung a lump hammer, his anvil ringing and the hot work-piece clashing as he braced its glowing end for his next strike. From the outhouse where she hid, Martha watched between its knotty boards, waiting for the old tyrant to turn away so she could safely bolt across the yard and into the house. Not much escaped her father’s attention as a rule, but the man’s thoughts often wandered from the grimy confines of the forge.

Horses he’d shod and re-shod for years came less often now, and the beasts that were brought were likely to be hauling some greasy contraption like the one that lay in pieces amid the dust and cinders on the floor. Moses worked at mending machinery of increasingly perplexing design, but being more of a Farrier than a Blacksmith, he often complained about how he could be expected to know which bits went where?

Men of the village would gather at the forge to smoke their pipes and spit, and Moses had taken to setting the most puzzling items aside until he could pick the brains of his more quick-witted neighbors. Ambling to the water butt Moses quenched the smoking work piece, unaware of Martha’s dash from the privy to the house.

Closing the heavy door in a hurry without shaking the entire building took some effort, even for the vigorous Martha. She pressed her back to its rough timbers while her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light filtering into the room through the lattice window; somewhere she had brothers who delighted in tormenting her, and were ingenious at it.

Of course little sister Marjorie and baby Earnest were no threat, and poor Miriam had “gone-the-way-of-all-things” as mother Ellen often said in that sullen way of hers; though Miriam wouldn’t have hurt a fly anyway. The boys were probably doing fetch-and-carry for father, or perhaps had sloped off to smoke a bowl in one of their secret hideouts. They’d magically re-appear when they caught a whiff of hot food.

Martha worried the coals in the stove’s firebox before placing seven potatoes in the oven: The biggest for the old man; two good-sized ones for the boys; one each for herself and twin sister Nell, and one for Frances, though Frances was in love and lately far too bemused to eat much. Little Earnest and baby Marjorie would share a spud, and mother would take as much bread and milk as she could keep down.

The London coach trundled past on the road outside; time for mother’s wash and a plump up of her bedding. Martha ladled water from a pot on the stove into a bucket.

(Continuing)

Do Not Pass Go…

My street was usually pretty quiet but seemed extraordinarily so that chilly November morning in 2006; even the birds were taking a lie-in. As the bathtub filled and I waited for my computer to get me online to check e-mails I saw a late model van cruise by. In it two leather-jacketed men were apparently checking mailbox numbers. Minutes later one of them knocked on my door while the other snooped around in my garage. Things looked a little sketchy. After establishing that I was the guy they’d been sent for, the obviously senior companion let me know that they worked for Homeland Security and that for some time I’d been designated as a fugitive-from-justice: This startling news came shortly before I saw the last of my lovely little house in Salem, Ohio.

After a twenty-mile drive south to Steubenville to collect another alleged fugitive, a Trinidadian, we schlepped north to downtown Cleveland’s Federal Building where my new Caribbean friend and I were unceremoniously inducted into the US Prison System.

I was unruffled by my rapid transition from free man to ‘offender’… as classified just above the mug shot on my new ID card, and believe such objectivity had everything to do with the instinctive coping ‘mechanism’ that had served me well as an abandoned infant. It’s since become second nature to me. My stoic disconnect from complex emotions enabled me to shed stress as a baby, though its consequences have shaped much about my life and relationships. But more of that later.

Be it in the workplace, a ballgame or a sewing circle, wherever you go you’re likely to come across at least one ‘difficult’ individual. Forced proximity to several hundred people can present quite a few challenges of this nature. Oddly enough I quite enjoyed being locked up, or more correctly the half-year during which I was shuttled between jails in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. It was a valuable experience.

The tedious bit was not so much the loss of freedom as was having to make the adjustment between the normal and nocturnal regimes favored by fellow detainees. For long hours each day the clack and incessant slamming of domino tiles and the hypnotic sounds of table tennis were like audio-wallpaper, while at night the poker players took over with their jive-talk and slapping of cards onto steel tabletops. Other daily routines consisted of designated periods for personal ablutions, roll call and head-counts, distribution of medicines, outdoor recreation, library visits and of course mealtimes.

There were three meals each day, and though the food was doled out in measured portions I actually ate more in jail than I ever did ‘outside’, managing to put on weight which I’ve since shed and regained several times. The food’s not bad, until your personal stash of hot sauce runs out… but understand, this is coming from a guy who’ll eat cardboard if the gravy’s good.

The medications I was on tended to give me gas. It was a blessing. I got good at release-on-demand flatulence which enabled me to amuse my people with audible salutes to guards and other administrative big shots. Three times a day the ten-minute saunter in columns of two from cell-block to dining hall were cheery excursions, except perhaps for anyone down-wind of me.

Each evening between the day’s last meal and lights-out, impromptu faith groups noisily assembled for quasi-religious meetings and related caterwauling, while other individuals isolated with their personal stereos, chatted, or nested on their bunks.

Besides food and ritualized head-counts, prison routine revolved around the all-too-short recreation break and distribution of medications and mail. However if anything sufficiently pissed-off the guards  the rec period got cancelled.

Five times a day Muslims spread prayer mats towards the east and quietly did their thing. Others apparently enjoyed seeing how ornery they could get without being put in solitary confinement. Active participation in this group fluctuated, since our custodians obligingly removed bullies and other anti-socials to distant cells—otherwise known as ‘the hole’—where they might be given a choice of quitting their misbehavior-Du-jour or getting the crap beaten out of them.

(for A Millionfooted Rain)

Easy Money…

Friends ask me, ‘What are you doing here?’ and say, ‘Don’t you like America any more?’

‘They kicked me out,’ I tell them.

It’s true. After thirty-four years of calling the U S home— sixteen of them spent haggling with the Department of Justice over immigration issues, I was wheeled off to jail to await a decision as to how they’d like to punish me, as if being yanked from home and family and deprived of all my accumulated stuff wasn’t enough.

My musical career in the US was fraught with ups and downs, just as life is supposed to be. After my initial work in the seventies with Don Everly on his ‘Sunset Towers’ album, I went with Albert Lee under the auspices of A&M Records to help Joe Cocker prepare for a multinational tour.

For several weeks Joe and a handful of musical luminaries had been rehearsing at a ranch in Lompoc, California, and at some point two notoriously hot-headed members of the entourage had fallen out. One had taken shots at the other with a handgun and chased him in a rented car across a tinder-dry hillside. This started a brushfire and mightily pissed-off the locals, but thankfully nobody was significantly wounded or otherwise injured. Deciding that discretion was indeed the better part of valor one of the combatants gave up and went home. More about the following tour and subsequent others is worthy of its own chapter, which I’ll get to later.

Living sensibly on the road is something of an acquired skill. Laundromats can be crucial bolt holes to escape the insanity, since ‘go-fers’ will rarely think to look for you there. Plus you get clean clothes. Always using the same hotel chain is a way to surround yourself with familiar elements, thus helping to maintain mental health, assuming you had a measure of it in the first place. Holiday Inn, Ramada, Sheraton, Hilton, Marriott; it really doesn’t matter as long as you can hoodwink yourself into feeling like you’ve made it home at the end of a trying day.

Once you’ve achieved a degree of success, i.e. your budget allows you to hire Roadies and other personal assistants, you only have yourself to blame if you screw-up and/or party yourself into oblivion. The logistics of touring eventually all but drove me nuts. I played enough cavernous concert halls, sports-palaces and super domes with abysmal acoustics to the point where live gigs became more tedious than enjoyable. Even with complex sound monitoring systems I just couldn’t get the buzz that comes with more intimate venues.

Of course it wasn’t all lunacy. My years with Joe brought opportunities to work with a list of brilliant musicians and entertainers, and with my long-time friends Albert Lee, Joe Cocker and Joe’s P.A. Reggie Locke I lived just north of Malibu’s Zuma Beach at a cliff top compound with expensive views of the Pacific Ocean.

By 1988 Joe had finished the last major tour he’d attempt for several years, and I worked hard at breaking into the L.A. session scene… never an easy thing to do. I was surprised by the personal determination it demanded, and once there the sustained effort needed to just survive the grind. Instrument supply companies can have any drum set-up you might keep with them ready for use at whatever venue… handy for players working back-to-back sessions across town. However, such a convenience plus the ever-ready availability of drugs can make ‘burnout’ a career-busting problem. The fear is that turning down jobs would mean session ‘fixers’ would stop asking you to come and play, so you wind-up burning the proverbial candle at both ends.

After quitting Joe Cocker’s entourage I left Malibu and drove my Mustang 2+2 through Topanga Canyon to my favorite watering hole in Calabasas, The Sundance Saloon. Since Hollywood’s birth the San Fernando and Simi Valley areas have been home to all kinds of showbiz personalities, often with outlaw lifestyles that have been tacitly tolerated. The canyons and desert knolls around the Santa Susannah Pass are still that way.

Upstairs at The Sundance were the tiny rooms that became my home for a while, with my drum kit a semi-permanent fixture in the bar.  Among the regular nightly performers was an outfit that went by the name of ‘Easy Money’, a loose-knit group of musicians whose line-up tended to change from gig to gig. Its own leader sometimes referred to it as ‘the-last-minute-seven-phone-call-band’.

The group consisted of Ace Gibson, the legendary Jimmy ‘Guitar’ Smith, keyboard player John ‘Skip’ Schneider, steel guitar player Jimmy Eaton and myself; a core which Ace augmented with whatever musicians were currently in his favour. Sometimes a handful of extra players would show up expecting to play and were almost never refused.

Easy Money was no slick operation, but we had a following of staunch fans that were dubbed ‘the Easy Maniacs’. Had the band not been such a bunch of rowdies we’d certainly have landed a decent recording deal, but that might have spoiled my reasons for joining. The actual money was meager but playing with celebrated performers were priceless opportunities. I became friends with singers, songwriters and musicians whose records I used to bop to at school dances. We drank beer and bourbon, ate barbecued ribs and enchiladas and smoked weed like the good ol’ boys! Famous thespians called me neighbor, slapped me on the back and told me I was one hell of a drummer. I cohabited with California lovelies and starlets. I also became a raging drunk.

One night I blew the Mustang’s engine on the Ventura freeway, and during my subsequent hangover I sold it for a hundred and fifty bucks. What an idiot, you say…

(for ‘A Millionfooted Rain’)

Linda B

Linda and I were together for five years; longer than some real marriages.  She was the petite daughter of Hi Busse, leader of legendary country-western vocal group ‘Sons Of The Pioneers’. Hi— short for High Pockets— was a lanky, good natured man without a shred of deviousness, a trait which he passed on to Linda… besides the lanky part, that is.

She and her three children from a previous marital disaster lived in a log cabin on the Paramount Movie Ranch in Agoura, CA; it came with tiny frogs which would hop on anyone using the shower, roof-leaks and sticky glop with which to patch them, and the occasional need to deal with black widow spiders and rattlesnakes when they came too close to the house. I hated creepy-crawlies, whether with no legs or too many, but soon the close proximity of such critters grew less troublesome for me. The kids certainly didn’t seem too bothered.

The Mexican-style hacienda next door was home to an up-and-coming movie actor, his lady friend, a menage of dogs, cats, flocks of domesticated fowl, two Iguanas and a sizable patch of pampered marijuana plants. I can’t tell you the actor’s real name, but let’s just say he looked a bit like Nick Nolte.

It seems odd that neither the guy’s dogs nor his chickens raised the alarm the night I made a drunken crawl through desert scrub to filch some of his excellent boo. After uprooting a healthy looking Cannabis Sativa I carried it back down the hill to the cabin, all the while expecting to be shot, stabbed, mauled by predatory Mountain Lions or bitten by snakes. None of which happened.

Next morning not-Nick-Nolte mutely showed me a denuded plantation, and scuff-marks left by large tarpaulins loaded with his cherished botanicals as they’d been dragged to the highway. He guessed that rather than see the blossoming star get busted, some influential person had arranged the whole thing. I imagine whoever did the dirty deed had quietly waited in the darkness until I’d finished my own raid. Not-Nick-Nolte’s entire household must have been doing some serious snoozing that night.

(for ‘A Millionfooted Rain’)

A Millionfooted Rain

   …and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud…  Tom Woolfe: ‘Look Homeward Angel’

The rain started just before I got home from a Sunday afternoon drive with my adoptive parents Reg and Una. At some point during these time-honored jaunts we’d stop for beer and snacks at one of the many pubs that dot south-western England’s landscape. Maybe during this afternoon’s rest-stop Reg managed to down a sly noggin or two of something stronger than beer, because on the final leg home his attitude became pretty obstreperous. Suddenly he and I were loudly at each others throats. Reg was irate, saying that my driving was alarming mum, who tended to get nervous at speeds over fifty miles an hour anyway, bless her. When my dad opened his door to drag a foot on the road like some kind of brake I just about lost-it, but without missing a beat mum quickly got the situation de-fused.

Reg and Una lived in a nice little trailer park on the slopes of the ancient caldera which cradles the city of Bath. After they’d gone bustling indoors I sat brooding in my car. Six months earlier I’d dejectedly returned home after attempting to become a professional musician,  for three years schlepping back and forth across Britain and western Europe with my band ‘Johnny, Mike And The Shades’. There had been real chances for success, though the details were kept from me at the time, ostensibly ‘for my own good’.

Together we were frequent performers on national radio, and at one point the up-and-coming entrepreneur Brian Epstein wanted to sign us up. But our manager, Cana Variety Agency supremo Jack Fallon, would only consider a straight swap for Epstein’s group The Beatles. Of course that didn’t happen, and resulting tensions between ourselves and Fallon put an end to that phase of my career. I regret not having the presence of mind at the time to get busy with something else, but I let disillusionment get the better of me.

Back home in Bristol the crash-pad I shared with my spiffy double Ludwig drum set was my folks’ motor home. On retiring from farming they’d bought it to take a six month road trip around England before settling down at the trailer park. Things were kind of tight in there. I got several months worth of work at a cabaret club with my uncle Graham’s outfit ‘The Harry Graham Orchestra’. The band basically provided musical wallpaper for drunk-dancing and buffoons to eat scampi and chips from little plastic baskets. But I also got to accompany top visiting acts like Chubby Checker and Selena Jones, plus a few highly unmemorable others.

It was a foul night though not particularly cold, and I was leaving home again; this time for good. As the deluge dumped on the parking lot I moved my drums from the motor home into my Mini wagon. I was driving out of the dismal parking lot without any planned goodbyes when my dad’s unmistakably stocky figure lurched into the light from my car’s headlamps. He’d been watching me load my gear, and like me was drenched to the skin as we stood hugging contritely in the rain.

I didn’t get away that night, but the following morning as mum fed me breakfast, hers and my lower lips quivered a little. The storm had blown over ahead of a clear and sunny day for my drive to the home of  musical friends of mine a few miles outside of London.

A little back story: The world and me were at odds long before my first new name; there have been three of them besides my present one, itself a mixture of the others; all perfectly legal. I’ve had two mums, two dads and two very different families; three if you include the kids and staff at the orphanage.

Characterizing my natural parents’ behavior as abandonment wouldn’t be entirely fair in the light of their early death, firstly my mum from TB, after which dad let everything go including his own life. Decades later I have the patchwork emotions common to many grown-up abandoned infants. But all things considered I’m empowered by all that’s happened to me-‘blessed’ if you like, albeit at the cost of a few things I might like to have had.

If I got money for my most re-visited memory I’d buy us all lunch. It concerns my first punishment and a little girl playing quietly beside me in a sandpit, and no doubt struggling with her own bewilderment. I threw sand at her.
As a fellow three year old living at the orphanage in Broadstairs my erstwhile playmate couldn’t have merited such abuse, and a baby-sitting nurse delivered a no-nonsense lesson to that effect on my backside. Perhaps my spite was born after mother’s death from an idea that all females must be inherently cruel; an impression which the nurse’s spanking could have done little to correct.

I think I must have stopped breathing properly when mother went. With growing alarm that she was no longer there my breaths became ever more shallow, and a knot quickly formed in the spot where other babies’ solar plexus would be. The knot has only ever loosened at rare times when I’ve dared venture out of the panic-room inside my head.

My emotional injuries left me feeling as if I existed in an ethereal bubble. Solitude became familiar before I learned how to talk, and while other toddlers might clamor for attention I liked better to be left safely alone. I’d never have survived after mum’s death but for the selfless love of adoptive parents Reg and Una Rowney, and state-run child care, such as it was in the late nineteen-forties. I came to understand that life for orphans is about learning how to cope. All the world’s accumulated wisdom and psychobabble cannot seamlessly fix a child abandoned, in whatever circumstance.

Broadstairs, Kent, was a far cry from my south London home of Catford, which took a savage pounding from the Nazi war-machine. Evacuated in trains by the thousand, kids like me were sent to relative safety in the country; many being left with nothing to return to—if indeed they ever went back again.

My natural parents were a good looking couple: I have pictures. Mum Marjorie was an imposing and amiable woman; slim and pretty with long dark hair, which in my pictures she wore pinned up. She worked as a dog handler at Catford Stadium, and I think it’s there that typically dank evenings at dog racing events may have accelerated illness once Tuberculosis took hold.

Margie’s family felt she’d married ‘below herself’ once it became evident that handsome husband George was a womanizer with a penchant for booze. Never having become particularly close both families wouldn’t take me and older siblings Michael and Wendy, perhaps nervous about TB’s congenital nature.

Dad Attridge was a printer before joining the Territorial Army to spend the war on a Dulwich Common gun crew shooting at ‘doodlebug’ rockets. After mum’s death he left Mike in a private Boys Home on the south coast, promising to return for him and to collect Wendy and me once plans involving his ‘other’ woman were sorted. But their relationship ended abruptly and a deeply depressed George went on to die at his own parents’ home in Forest Hill.

Causes-of-death were given as the chronic kidney disease Nephritis and “complications from a wartime shrapnel wound”, but I wonder if George might have drunk himself into oblivion, and if a sympathetic family doctor could have written the death certificate to show something less stigmatic at the time than alcoholism.

Mike and Wendy were adopted by a couple almost twice our parents’ ages, while west-country farmers Reg and Una took me. Our homes were barely an hour’s drive apart, but from the little I saw of my siblings it might as well have been a thousand miles.

Miss Potter-otherwise known as my ‘ministry of pensions lady’-drove me in her little black car to my new home in the sleepy Somerset village of Churchill Green. New mum Una greeted us at the door and I immediately ran to put she and her ample skirts between Miss Potter and I; something which Una later said utterly endeared her to me. Michael’s and Wendy’s adoptions were also monitored by Miss Potter, who my brother remembers as a pleasant and mild-mannered young woman. Mike stayed in touch with her for several decades but to me she represented some things I wanted nothing more to do with.

The next seven years were both idyllic and problematic, in short the kind of life all children would enjoy in a perfect world. Picture-postcard springs turned into glorious summers and storybook autumns became chocolate box winters. Like owners of small farms anywhere Reg and Una weren’t exactly prosperous, but they ‘spoiled’ me nonetheless.
Old Farm was a sprawling group of buildings separated from a leafy country lane by a walled orchard. Fruit trees there provided not only apples for my new mum to bake into Sunday desserts smothered in syrup, but also literally stunning insights to the properties of gravity and inertia whenever I fell out of them. There too Bryan and I trapped yellow-jacket wasps in jam jars and destroyed them en-mass with great glee. Small boys can be brutal.

Four years older than me Bryan was Reg’s natural nephew whose own parents had died in the wartime bombing of Birmingham. With clear memories of them Bryan found bonding with Reg and Una difficult.

I envied the mealtime hubbub at friends’ houses, or perhaps I simply missed the feeding-frenzies of the orphanage. In stark contrast dining experiences at the farm were edgy affairs, at which I was effectively an only-child since Bryan was content to stay at boarding school and only ride the train home for end-of-term visits. Because of  our similar emotional issues he and I didn’t get along particularly well at first, but I grew to truly admire him. After gaining several degrees at Oxford University he went on to have a long and successful career in pharmacology.

At any time other than Christmas our so-called Front Room was strictly off limits to me and whichever cousins might show up for weekend visits. It was a kind of family shrine where ‘the-good-furniture’ lived, together with iconic photographs of my adoptive progenitors in stiff poses. Still the smells of cream sherry and cigars take me back to celebrations there of Christmases past, as do the aromas of Plum pudding and custard, Sage and Onion Stuffing, Pine fronds, wax candles and mothballs.

I was about six on the day a small wooden effigy was passed back and forth along the pews at a Sunday meeting in the village chapel. A returned missionary nurse had brought it from Africa and come to talk about her work. I don’t know if she mentioned the kind of wood the figurine was carved from but its aroma fixed deeply in my mind. In the decades since I’ve caught rare whiffs of it on occasion, and, powered by memory alone, been whisked at faster-than-light speed back to the captivating moment I first smelled it.

The biggest of the farm’s meadows sloped gently down to its southern boundary, where a stream fed and drained a nearby pond. Ringed by willow trees it was a magical place I often visited with friends both real and imaginary.
When the weather was hot the stream water dwindled to a sorry trickle and the pond filled instead with fluid waste from our dairy herd. On the upwind side it didn’t smell too bad if left undisturbed, and with the shadows of willow branches braiding across the dark surface it was nevertheless a pretty spot. But barely beneath the liquid surface lay a depth of fetid muck.

Gordon was there; Bryan’s rotund friend from a nearby farm, and the Avery twins; friends of my own from their family farm down the road. Bryan and Gordon were older than the twins and I, which created a natural division in the gang; that and the fact that some of us saw Gordon as a bit of a creep. Once he’d led us all into my playroom, locked the door and demonstrated his newly discovered ability to masturbate, complete with squinty eyes and unabashed grunting.

At the edge of the pond was a fallen tree in an advanced stage of rotting. My pals enthusiastically assured me that lumberjack-style log rolling skills could be easily mastered by a bright young chap like me so I blithely hopped on. I had a fleeting glimpse of my own feet framed by willow branches against the bluest of blue skies, before plunging head first into the pond.

I must have looked like a pint-sized ‘Creature From The Black Lagoon’ when I surfaced what seemed like a couple of millennia later. The guys all but wet themselves as they stumbled around laughing, while I stood in the middle of the pond gulping lungfuls of bad air.
I struggled from the sucking morass and ran back to the house bawling every step of the way, followed across the endless meadow by Bryan, Gordon and my former friends the Avery twins, all positively stupefied with mirth.

Perhaps a tailwind wafted the stink of my effluent-soaked gallop ahead of me, though it could have been my own mortified screams, the other guys’ insane cackling or possibly some kind of mum-radar that tipped her off. In any event by the time I reached the house she was already bucketing hot water into a tin washtub right there on the back porch. Within seconds she had me standing in it naked and was scrubbing my bare skin with the hardest bristle brush this side of the black stump. Shaking with rage and embarrassment I wished the twins-and most especially Gordon-would laugh even harder so their stupid hearts might just stop.

In his own quiet way Reg was an inspired man. He’d often bring me old gramophones, case-clocks and other contraptions he’d buy on mid-week trips to local livestock markets; the kinds of thing that have since become valuable antiques. I remember Una saying, “Oh, Reg; you know he’s just going to take that to pieces and ruin it.” To which Reg said nothing. He knew I would indeed soon have it torn apart, but it was okay because he understood that with my natural curiosity I’d someday figure out how things worked and be able to put them back together. From that wise insight grew something which has saved me lots of time, hassle and money: An aptitude for fixing things.

Though long since demolished, at one time a windmill had stood at one end of the house to grind the farm’s grain. Dad then hired a threshing machine for a couple of days each summer and it seemed like all the locals showed up to help bring in the harvest. Women carried simple meals of freshly baked bread, apples, cheeses, onions and flagons of rough cider out to the fields, and after grain sacks had finally been sewn shut and stacked ready for trucking to the mill dad shot a pig right between the eyes. The men dressed and spit-roast it over a fire in the farmyard and we all celebrated; men, women, kids and dogs.

For Good Queen Betty’s coronation in the early fifties my folks cranked life up a notch and bought a TV… the first one in the village. The parlor at Old Farm was jam-packed with neighbors sipping tea as they ooh-ed and ah-ed over the grainy monochrome images and puny sound.
After the initial awe about television’s advent subsided I usually managed to behave well enough that I was allowed to stay up on Saturday nights to watch ‘The Variety Show’ or ‘Cafe Continental’; my introduction to showbiz.

Other than Radio Luxembourg from continental Europe nobody was putting much new music out there in the ether. Then Independent Television’s start-up in nineteen fifty-five ended the BBC’s monopoly of the UK airwaves.

The little radio I’d soldered together from a kit bought through a comic book ad barely picked up Luxembourg’s feeble signal, but as I listened under the blankets to the distorted sound on my single earphone I was about as excited as a farm boy could get with his pajamas on.
In nineteen sixty-four the rogue ‘Radio Caroline’ started broadcasting from an old light ship moored off England’s south-east coast, giving a big charge to public radio. Skiffle music was a ‘big thing’ then, with its washboards, jugs, tea chest basses and kazoos; that and ‘Trad’… a form of jazz more akin to Dixieland than any other, and hugely popular with the college-set.

Free-radio deejays were less bound by restrictive play lists so listeners were treated to increasingly more music from across the-big-pond. America’s Country & Western music styles got more exposure, along with Rhythm & Blues and Soul music. Brit musicians were quickly all-over-it and new sounds were being made in Working Men’s Clubs, church hall dances and boy scout fund-raisers everywhere.

In it’s hey-day Old Farm had been big, but over time parts of it were sold off. Reg and Una tried a succession of things, from dairy farming and cereal crops to pigs and poultry, but were unable to counter a potentially fatal flaw: The shedding of acreage had made the property affordable but too small to be self-supporting. And so it was that on my eighth birthday, along with my first pair of roller skates, I got the devastating news that we to leave Old Farm.

Despite my dismay I settled for life in a more modern but considerably smaller house just outside Bristol. It was incomparable to my beloved Old Farm, but I’d already had considerable experience of dealing with drastic change.

The day I built a small fire in the chicken run Una watched furtively from the kitchen window. With her nervous disposition I imagine she found it hard not to intervene as I squat in the dirt beside my fire boiling water and broad-beans in a little saucepan. I was ten and the beans were at least as delicious as anything I’ve ever eaten.  Neither did mum fuss at me the time she caught me in the pantry sipping vinegar straight from the bottle. I think now maybe she should have.

Like kids everywhere I had scars: Near the tip of my right pinky is one I got while riding the running-board of a seed-drill towed by our farm tractor. I stuck my hand into the seed hopper not knowing there was a worm-screw turning beneath the grain to move it through channels and fall into the furrowed dirt. Luckily it was just a small chunk of my finger that got planted with the wheat that day.
Scars on my left wrist and right knee came from losing control of my soap-box cart on Black Rock Lane. I must have been crazy to try riding down that hill. With my pal Buck… short for Bucket… real name Graham, I scavenged landfills for old pushchairs and prams-better known to some as strollers and baby carriages-and any decent wheels found got fixed to constructs of planks and crates. Some carts turned out really well, having brakes, steering and even suspension of sorts; these were the best ones, which usually got ‘accidentally’ run over in the driveway. I hated it when that happened and always suspected dad of benign treachery.

Serious introspection was beyond me then, and child psychology at the time did little to help me cope with emotional injury, despite Reg and Una’s untiring kindliness. Fractured logic had already created several wrong-headed notions in my mind and I began finding ways to ease my anxieties, albeit temporarily.
My earliest vice was chocolate, and it looks like I may bear that particular burden until my dying day. In fact I don’t see any possible after-life that doesn’t include chocolate as particularly attractive.

Latent effects of abandonment had me greedy for affection or anything similar, and girl playmates seemed to gleefully share my pre-pubescent interest. If that seems like a lame excuse for not dealing well with one of life’s most sensitive challenges so be it. That was then, and we’re all grown up now; but it brings me to my second vice.

Before and during my early teens I played impudently with girlfriends’ affections. Keeping my options open meant the safe-distancing of them from each other… a manageable but far from easy task, as any cheat can confirm. My weekday girls were in separate grades at school… one in my year and the other a year behind; but it was my Sunday girls who accompanied me down the road to shameless impropriety.

Christine and Heather were best-friends with no qualms about the three of us sharing each other’s company, but aside from some clumsy fumbling there were no overtly sexual shenanigans. Hormones were rampant nevertheless, making Sunday school coach trips to places of interest giddy times indeed. Christine’s older sister and I furtively shared some illicit groping, and everything seemed to be moving-right-along until the girls all found out about each other. From that point on things got ever more sketchy until they joined forces and dumped me en-mass.

Then there was alcohol. As with other addictions much has been written about its withering effect on individuals and society in general. It’s also been said that nobody sets out to become an alcoholic, though the zeal with which I’ve seen many people drink might seem to contradict that.

Music is of course not a vice per-se, though some might argue that rock ‘n roll comes close. Indeed my first electric guitar may have been instrumental in setting me on the road to total degeneracy. Its single pickup and control knobs were an integral part of the scratch plate with the amplifier cord hard-wired into it. Consequently it wasn’t long before I’d clumsily torn the electronics completely off the darned thing.

My second instrument was a solid-body guitar… and I mean solid, being little more than a lacquered plank with strings. On dark and stormy nights I would cycle for miles to a guitar teacher’s house, ‘the plank’ strapped across my back; and though the experiences may have improved my physique I can’t say the same for any musical ability. When a couple of fellow guitarists put a group together I was cajoled into being the drummer, so before long I again found myself cycling for miles on dark and stormy nights, but with a snare drum strapped on my back.
We were ‘Paddy and The Footpads’ and even managed to win a talent show at a shabby trailer-park on the outskirts of the city. We hit ‘em with Duane Eddy’s ‘Rebel Rouser’ and ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ by The Ventures, though some of the chords might have been somewhat ‘creative’. Years later I’d find myself doing sessions at the North Hollywood recording studio where The Ventures made their hits.

Across the road from my Bristol home lived a young chap who worked for the BBC. He had state-of-the-art hifi equipment and a pretty decent Premier drum set which he let me borrow for a while. In my room I’d stack four albums on my little record-player and play along with them: The classic ‘The Atomic Mr Basie’, ‘Pyramid’ by the Modern Jazz Quartet, ‘The Twang’s The Thang’ By Duane Eddy and The Rebels, and ‘Birth Of The Beat’ by Sandy Nelson. Years later I could still identify Sonny Payne’s, Connie Kay’s and Jimmy Troxel’s licks in my own playing…and of course the thud ‘n blunder of the one and only Sandy Nelson.

One day while bunking-off classes at Bristol’s College Of Commerce I was mesmerized by the sound coming from a music store of ‘Johnny Colville’s Red Dragons’ trying out an echo unit. The band had three regular guitars, no bass, and-before I talked my way into it-no drummer. We overheard something about another music store several blocks away having Fender guitars in the window. We ran there like crazy people and before long my new pals had impulsively signed away several subsequent paychecks for two fiesta red Stratocasters and a matching Precision Bass.

In a kids’ comic of the time was a space-alien character called ‘The Mekon’. He was blue, had a large, perfectly domed cranium and seemed to just float around. Dragons’ guitarist, the chain smoking Mervyn, was nicknamed ‘The Mekon’ because he possessed at least two of his namesake’s attributes. Merv was a shoo-in to be the bass player.
Whatever gigs we managed to find barely netted us enough cash to buy beer and cheap smokes, possibly because we spent more time at a sleazy billiard hall in deepest, darkest Bristol than we did rehearsing.

Within a decade I was drinking pretty heavily and smoking more weed than you could shake a stick at, until the anxiety attacks began and I quit. The amount of cocaine and other drugs I did was negligible, but I certainly loved to puff. At the height of London’s burgeoning drug culture in the sixties and seventies I repeatedly challenged fate by carrying my hashish and smoking paraphernalia in a cigar box while walking home from gigs to my flat in Lancaster Gate. In those days I dressed like a Barbary pirate; not exactly inconspicuous, but I never got rousted. Somewhat amazingly neither did I catch any kind of disease from my then squeeze, a South Kensington call-girl.

(continuing)

There’s A Fly In My Soup

Some things can be a bit difficult to write about if not necessarily hard to remember. A case-in-point is Heads Hands and Feet, the group of British musicians from the nineteen-seventies in which I played the drums, sang backup and shook, rattled, rolled, hammered, scraped and bashed all manner of percussion instruments.

We worked hard and had a growing fan base, but to a man were not very good at compromise. Wanting different things isn’t inherently bad but as seasoned musicians our careers were already peppered with achievements and disappointments to the point where we had become guarded about sharing hopes and dreams. That reluctance also inhibited the free exchange of musical ideas and as a result the band never really found a unique focus, instead becoming something of a stylistic Chameleon.

Variety was nevertheless part of Heads Hands and Feet’s appeal, but successfully presenting such diversity often made live performances challenging for band and audiences alike, and that’s before you get ‘behind-the-scenes’. This would be a good time to remark that regardless of the loss of what may have become a successful and long-lived companionship I have no axe-to-grind with any of my former band-mates. It was what it was; is what it is, and I don’t waste time wishing the past were different.

A couple of days before our first rehearsal at a pub in Dagenham, south London, Tony Colton had been glassed in the face in a bar fight. He wore the resulting wound with aplomb, though his new dueling-scar was as yet still a line of sutures across his left cheek. Tony and long time writing partner Ray Smith’s album ‘Poet And The One-Man Band’ was newly released, but from the list of brilliant players who’d contributed to it none would commit to live performances. Ray and TC needed to form a road band before interest in the new record waned, but it seemed everyone was hotly pursuing other opportunities or tilting at windmills of their own.

Things were happening fast but the earth-shrinking effect of the Internet was still in the future, and even though the fledgling popular-music industry was cranking up feverishly on many levels, the pace of surface mail and pre-satellite communications still governed the speed of worldwide business. No facet of international management was as fluid then, meaning that deals and details took far longer to sort out. Mantra-of-the-day for publishers was ‘Time Is Money’; a pithy expression often used by corporate accountants in attempts to herd artists toward greater productivity.

Beyond the abilities of Tony Colton (‘Poet’) and Ray Smith (‘The One-Man Band’) there was certainly no lack of creative talent among us, but TC kept a grip on all facets of our business affairs. His jealous control of vinyl-time and songwriting credits arguably contributed much to the band’s break up.

For years beyond their ‘peak’ many bands have since managed to record, do reunion concerts and even tour successfully, thus prolonging their creative lives together; but having never developed a true partnership Heads Hands And Feet didn’t get to do those things. Too bad…

(for ‘A Millionfooted Rain’)

Vinegar Joe Road Trip

It had been a stormy night over London and the south east, with weather as bad as any for several decades. Vinegar Joe tour manager and former drummer John Woods made the rounds in the gig wagon the following morning, collecting band members and taking us to Biggin Hill, the airfield which loomed large in the RAF’s wartime defense of London.

It was used still by a small flying club. Grassy areas had old bomb damage, though the runway and apron had been patched with asphalt and the buildings with steel panels the color of old pewter.

Parked beside the main building was an antiquated DeHavilland aircraft. Twin engined and in sore need of fresh paint, the old bi-plane sat in typical tail-wheeled posture, nose cocked skyward seemingly aloof to our derisive comments about its airworthiness. Privately I hoped it wasn’t the plane the office had chartered sight-unseen for our weekend trip to rock ‘n roll starved Yugoslavia. It was.

There was seating for a dozen passengers, but despite my initial reluctance to even go aboard I laid claim to one of the two places in the cockpit. At engine-start this afforded me an excellent view of the flight instruments as they bounced around on a package shelf… which the pilot assured me was actually called ‘the dashboard’. Our flying hero sported a handlebar mustache, white silk neck-scarf, a jaunty leather beany hat a-la ‘Biggles Of The Camel Squadron’, and other kit that made me wonder if the plane had a heater. I pulled my own heat source from my backpack and took an heroic swig as our plane lurched into sunny skies over the south downs.

Following an uneventful food and fuel stop in Frankfurt we flew into a blizzard somewhere over the German hinterland. The sky was raining down in chunks but thanks to some excellent Scots beverage I managed to salvage a modicum of enjoyment from the situation. But things took a turn for the worse when weather conditions forced an unscheduled landing in Soviet territory. At that time most people in the western hemisphere would cheerfully have swum with sharks rather than come face-to-face with the Russian military.

It was late on a Friday afternoon and the place was dismally quiet. Imagine the Formica-laminated ambiance of a cavernous building in which the only warm bodies belong to a few well-armed trolls and equally brutish looking dogs, plus a group of hirsute and partially drunk rock musicians. Our intrepid pilot, a taciturn chap, sloped off to try and discover where the hell we were, while the rest of us feigned nonchalance under the contemptuous glare of men and dogs who all looked like they’d relish eating our faces.

From the occasional shriek of large jets passing uncomfortably close above our heads, the terminal must have been directly under the flight path. ‘Biggles’, our intrepid pilot, eventually returned with the news that we’d been officially grounded and must wait to be vetted by immigration officers, who, naturally, wouldn’t be back until some time on Monday. Suddenly the armed guards and their slavering pets seemed even more menacing, and the idea of being closeted with them for any length of time was a powerful depressant. At this point they hadn’t yet hassled us so we’d managed to keep our cigarettes and liquor, which we considered trying to barter for a few creature-comforts, like showers and maybe a bed or two. How silly.

I don’t know if anyone had drugs stashed; if so they were pretty cool about it. I certainly didn’t, for the simple reason that anytime we encountered customs checkpoints I or bass player and beloved fellow freak Steve York, were the ones most often singled-out for the dreaded ‘cavity search’. That got old very, very quickly. In any event none of us were ever busted for contraband.

Misery was rife as we draped ourselves across furniture designed to make the human form uncomfortable in any position. Beyond the murmur of soldiers trying to guess our genders and the clicking of canine claws on the faux-marble floor, the only sound now was the dismal wail of the storm. There wasn’t even any canned music. What I wouldn’t have given to hear some Don Ho or Edmundo Ross; even Cecil Norman And The Rhythm Players..!

After several lifetimes had passed in a little less than an hour I heard a low whistle. Biggles’ grinning face and heavily gloved hand- beckoning, showed through a barely open door under a sign bearing the local equivalent of the word ‘NO’. The doorway opened onto the apron where our stalwart aircraft was being pummelled by the storm. Like thieves in the night we followed our fearless fly-boy and bundled into it, fully expecting to be ripped apart by dogs and/or bullets at any instant. Fear loomed large all the way to Ljubljana as our little plane tree-hopped for the rest of the journey.

Once there we saw nothing of Biggles until two days later and it was time to go home; we found him and his trusty airplane dutifully waiting at the airport all gassed-up and ready to go. On the way home we hit a terrifying storm somewhere over France. Biggles was even more tight-lipped than usual, perhaps silently pleading to a favorite deity that the wings would stay on the plane. Though I’d sucked down a whole fifth of Slivovitz I still hadn’t achieved perfect catatonia because of the adrenaline flooding my system.

Imagine my joy as our little plane fell below cloud-cover that went almost down to the rug, and I saw runway lights approaching at an impossibly steep angle. We were flying sideways, but at least  even if the wretched wings blew off now we were only a couple of hundred feet above Gatwick.

Biggles’ one-wheeled landing of that vintage airplane, sideways in a raging storm, made me want to kiss the chubby rascal! Nevertheless I saved my smooch for the pavement after I’d climbed out of that damned flying coffin.

That weekend’s concerts in what later became Slovenia may have been unexceptional, and probably had nothing to do with wars that ravaged the area in subsequent years. But who knows?

(for ‘A Millionfooted Rain’.)

All In A Day’s Work

I kept walking as normally as I could, hoping there’d be no more trouble— God knows I didn’t want any more trouble.

Beyond a scuffed-up strip of turf and a couple of trashed shopping carts, housing communities towered on either side of me. Incredibly I started thinking of Frank Lloyd Wright—the old Simon and Garfunkel song, not the old architect. It was getting hard to focus on anything besides the fact that I’d just been shot.

‘Slummers’ eyed me from their hidey-holes in the municipal shrubbery. The mess from my wound was running down my chest; my torso; my legs. Wobbly. Feverish. There’s my building; Lobby; Elevator; Apartment: Good thing the doors still recognize me…

I docked amid the whisper of sensors and servos, praying as I powered-down that the gizmos behind the wall would hurry the hell up and fix me. I dreamed of someone saying, “You don’t need to worry until the bomb stops ticking,” whatever that meant for Cryssake; then suddenly I was waking up.

My messed-up clothing was gone, snipped from my body and incinerated by the appropriate modules, along with my damaged ‘flesh’ and other bits. It felt good to be back at ambient temperature with my fluids all topped-up and cool, so I lay there savoring the moment for a while before checking in; an option only us autonomous bots can enjoy.

The voice in my head started.

“Six?”

I transmitted my affirmation ID. Something was out-of-whack again: There were enough monitors and tell-tales in me to run the frigging Space Agency, and they couldn’t see I was online?

I sent, “I wanna frag suit,” in my least servile tone; “This shit’s getting old!”

The come-back was predictable: “You’re already way too easy to spot; hows about we just put a flashing light on your head?”

To keep the human on the other end sweet I threw in my best casual chuckle; “I’ll start a union for pissed-off bots,” I grumbled.

“Impossible.”

“Hey pal; there’s ways to hack any system.” I was kidding, but of course it’s true.

We may be constructs of mammalian stem-cells, nano-bots— the creepy little buggers, ceramics, plastics and electronics all held together by Dog-knows-what, but we could clone ourselves if it weren’t for the root protocol prohibiting it. Uncle Asimov’s “Thou Shalt Harm No Human” dictum went out the window many moons ago but humans kept the right to create and terminate us at whim. Since the world went haywire last century bots like me have been the only way to police things. The sudden glut of ascendant grassroots organizations and vigilante groups meant the only way former regimes could keep a grip was to go underground.

“Back to work, Six— I got one for you.”

(continuing)

Wynfarthing

It was barely dawn and they were killing some poor bastard. A bowshot away Silas Half stood on the hill overlooking the crossroad south of Caistor Township, watching the victim convulse in terror as his captors forced him to the ground. One of them, carrying a club, placed a foot roughly on the man’s neck and abruptly bashed his head in. It had been a while since the last public execution and Silas felt a thrill—always a good way to start the day. The wavering cheer that went up from a small crowd that had gathered said it was an entertaining if not particularly noteworthy execution. A tonsured monk made the sacred sign over the twitching corpse and turned away.
It is the year of our Lord four hundred and fifty-five; Vortigern is newly come to power, and nobody trusts anyone.

The stranger came a week before, saying he was from Wynfarthing, a fenland village a day’s walk to the south. He had no money and would not tell the nature of his business so the watchmen were obliged to hold him. A rider was even sent down to Wynfarthing but no one came forward to vouch for the man.
The crowd dispersed leaving the watchmen to dispose of the body, aided and abetted by the idiot fringe of local youth, namely Mortigan Yapp and a scruffy ginger-haired boy known only as Cutlip.
Yapp’s name was well suited, given his aptitude for disrupting any event with inane comments and general obtuseness. He had survived for seventeen summers in and around the orchards his father tended for the local lord. Scrumpy, the rough cider made from tart apples, had kept his mother happy throughout her baby’s gestation; the very reason, some said, the boy turned out to be an addle-pate.
Besides his obvious mental challenges Yapp had a physical disability. He’d once cornered a wild pig in some quarry workings and the animal had gored his thigh badly before thrashing off into the forest. The torn flesh never healed properly, resulting in a permanent limp and the good sense to never again underestimate any creature’s desire to survive.
His inseparable companion, Cutlip, was so-called because of a scar which crossed his right cheek from the corner of his mouth almost to his ear. It had been given him by his cronies as plain indication of his skills as a liar, cheat and blatant toady. The bond he shared with Yapp might have been heart-warming had anyone cared much about either of them, but the pair’s lack of recognizable personal virtues queered it.

Caistor Abbey had been home to Silas Half for almost his entire life. Too young to fully understand the circumstances that led to his living there Silas just piece-together history as best he could from stories the monks told about the Romans.
About when their swift exodus gave rise to riotous high spirits, and fools ran the streets summarily punishing people they thought had tolerated the old enemy too easily. No one knew what to do next; they said it was as if people’s wits had been sucked out. Some elders thought Rome’s abandonment re-injured everyone, and that the savagery was just mindless frustration. Men seemed helpless as babes, but the upstart Vortigern saw his chance. Suddenly nowhere was safe from his hastily recruited groups of louts and bullies as they plundered at whim.
Silas was little more than a suckling when hell came through the wall of his hme; the thunderous crush of men and horses shattering an autumn night and his sleeping parents’ heads. The family lodger scrapped bravely until clubbed senseless—his body falling on top of baby Silas; and in the stupefying havoc they too were left for dead.
For a long time afterwards Silas’ dreams rang with the clatter of hoof and harness, fading into the darkness along with the sound of coarse laughter and some other child’s terrified screams. He saw a drizzle of burning reeds from the roof and choked on the stink of death

Silas delivered the two hares he’d caught to brother Cornelius, the kitchener. Mutely Cornelius cut a slice of bread and tossed it on the table, followed by a small chunk of cheese and a crisp onion— reward for Silas’ contribution to the pot. The boy shook a couple of weevils from the bread and trod on them before pulling an old milking-stool to the table. It creaked loudly as he sat while Cornelius set about cleaning the hares.
“They killed the stranger out at the crossroads,” said Silas through a half chewed mouthful of onion and bread. “He must have kept his secret ‘til the end?”
“They would have done him anyway,” muttered Cornelius with customary moodiness, and slit the belly of the first hare. He reached into the carcass and began drawing out the still warm innards; giblets, heart, lights and liver. They would be cut up and added to the kettle of pottage stewing next to a constant fire at the hearth.
The year’s sorry harvest meant nothing could be wasted. No sooner had sowing been finished than an unusually heavy rain washed much of the topsoil away exposing the seed. It had been a bounty for local fauna, so it was only right that they have a place at Caistor’s table.

The monks weren’t made to take vows of silence, though none could claim to be much of a conversationalist—least of all the mordant Cornelius.
“Go hang those,” he said, plonking the hares’ gutted carcasses in front of Silas, “And bring me a brace of pheasant.” Silas popped the last bite of onion into his mouth and stuffed the remaining cheese and bread into his shirt; breakfast would almost certainly be stolen if he didn’t take it with him.

In the rare event of a hot day the priory’s cool corridors were a welcome retreat, otherwise it was gloomy and chill. Not even successive days of sunshine could warm the upper stonework enough to bring heat down to the undercroft. Silas negotiated the warren of dimly lit passages to the room where meats were stored, and sometimes the shrouded cadavers of newly departed monks awaiting burial. Rounding a corner he collided full on with someone running the other way.

Silas’ step was barely broken, but the slight woman who’d careened into him was sent sprawling gracelessly—all dark wool and pale linen.
“Turd!” she said in a harsh whisper; “What in God’s name are you doing?”
Not thinking that anyone smelling so clean might be of significant rank and thus untouchable to commoners, Silas reached down and grasped the woman’s slender wrist; “An accident—I’m sorry,” he said.
“Unhand me,” she growled, snatching her arm away; “And keep your voice down.” She struggled awkwardly to her feet, hampered by voluminous skirts. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Should I?” Retorted Silas. He reached up and took a torch from its wall sconce. “And why need anyone whisper down here—in God’s name or otherwise?”
“There are dead people here,” said the woman; “You must be respectful.” Silas raised the torch so he could get a better look at her face.
From the unblemished complexion and impish look he guessed her to be no more than fourteen, but her clothes were not the ones of a girl. Below the woollen tunic that hung to her knees, a chemise of white linen draped to the floor. Silas couldn’t resist the impulsive glance which told him that beneath it all her breasts were either modishly bound or that she was woefully flat-chested. On her head a cowl covered a starched wimple that completely hid her hair. The woman was wearing the sparse accoutrements of a nun.
“Forgive me, sister.” Said Silas, “I was hurrying on an errand for the kitchener”.
“Then hurry on, kitchen boy.” She said, jostling past him haughtily. The fragrance of lavender followed her down the passageway.
“What a pity,” thought Silas; mildly lamenting the loss of such a pretty woman to the mirthless retinue who were the Brides Of Christ.

In the flesh room he hung the hares beyond the reach of scavenging rats and took down the two pheasants he’d been told to bring back. Pheasants were hung to bleed for at least four days before cooking; this much Silas knew, though he’d never actually eaten pheasant. Making his way back to the kitchen he mulled-over the earlier encounter. With the sullen tang of raw soap and their curiously feminine odour he’d never thought nuns smelled particularly nice; but the girl’s scent lingered in Silas’ nostrils. He even considered a quick visit to the privy to relieve himself, before fears of blindness and possible eternal damnation bridled his thoughts.

The atmosphere in the kitchen had changed in the few minutes he’d been gone. Cornelius was not there, only the gaunt figure of Scratch Folland warming his back by the kitchen fire, his lips pursed peevishly tight. Silas avoided the man’s stare as he placed the pheasants on the table and sat down to resume breakfasting. Friar Folland was most likely there to mete out trouble—seemingly his prime raison d’être, but to Silas the mere presence of the testy old fart was bothersome enough.
Folland got the nickname ‘Scratch’ because of his tendency to fuss with the hair behind his ears when in deep thought. His former calling of tutor to Caistor’s novices often found him that way. But something had bothered Scratch and he no longer taught—at least not under the auspices of the church. As an itinerant monk, Scratch haunted streets and alleyways shouting blandishments at the heavens and God’s instruction to the masses. Most townsfolk thought his brain was addled, but just in case the Spirit Of God inhabited mad friars too they fed him and let him sleep with the animals when weather was bad.

“Prideaux is coming here,” announced the old friar with a sideways leer. Besides the two men the room was empty, but Scratch always played to full dramatic effect no matter how large or small his audience. “The Prelate is camped with his men at Saint Andrew’s thorpe,” he continued with obvious disdain, “And befouling the river there as I speak.” Silas stifled a groan. Visitors meant extra work; even more so whenever they were nobles or some kind of high cleric. Just the same he was glad they’d set up a camp of their own so he wouldn’t have to give up his sleeping nest in the barn.

Silas proffered a torn scrap of his bread, thinking Scratch might relax enough to tell more. “You’ve seen their camp then?” he prompted.
“Aye, lad… and shared a fire with some of them last evening, in God’s service of course.” He crossed himself and stepped closer to the fire’s warmth, raising his threadbare habit to expose scrawny legs and withered genitals. “Those bastards are an ugly bunch.”
Glad that the fire’s draught would be wafting the smell of Folland’s rancid arse up the chimney, Silas became a little bolder:
“Why would the prelate come here?” he asked with feigned nonchalance.
“Money! Why else?” snapped Scratch.
“Surely there’s not enough in Caistor’s coffers to warrant a visit?” said Silas. Scratch dropped to a crouch beside the young man and cast a furtive glance around the room. “Listen,” he croaked; “There’s a mystery down in Wynfarthing.”
He launched into a tale:
“Legend has it that a villain once sought sanctuary in the Church of Mary there, which was granted on condition he give up everything he carried and leave this land on the next available ship. In time-honoured way his clothes alone were returned to him and he was escorted to the river by the watch, where they put the scoundrel on a vessel bound for Friesia.”
Silas chewed; “I’ve heard of this,” he said. “The man’s forfeited sword is said to have unnatural power; a chest for its safe-keeping sits in the church’s eastern nave.”
Scratch’s face animated with growing excitement:
“Pilgrims go to Wynfarthing to honour what’s become a thing of great worth! One such is a veiled woman who arrives each Sabbath morning in a fancy cart, the horse having clearly been driven hard. While her driver rubs the animal down and prepares for the return journey, the woman goes directly to the east nave and lights a candle, placing it before the chest with a coin besides. She bends the knee and crosses herself before leaving as quietly as she came; all the while ignoring the worship service.”

Scratch’s face was scant inches from Silas, who recoiled from the fetid breath and spittle of the old man’s mouth. “Some think her to be a ghost despite the priest’s assurances to the contrary—though he refuses to say who she is.”
A glimmer started behind Silas’ eyes. Scratch’s evening at the bishop’s fireside had been revealing, though Silas thought the old man missed a trick by not trading the knowledge for something edible. Remembering the scrap of stale bread he’d donated he was beginning to think it might have been a bargain.
“Brother Folland,” he said, “Speak no more of this to anyone else and I think I can do us both some good.”

(continued)

Waiting

The last train to anywhere was gone.  Outside the night was foul; rain spattered on the windows and ran down the glass in sorry rivulets, leaking through the skylight at a couple of places where glazing putty had cracked and fallen away.  I’d mentioned it several times to the maintenance man― while he was busy gazing at my boobs.

At a back table of the otherwise deserted waiting room sat a man, poring over a newspaper laid on the Formica tabletop.  Something about him seemed familiar:

Forty-ish, I guessed; Charcoal gray suit, conservative necktie, and pale shirt with just the right amount of cuff showing at the wrist; Dark, well groomed mustache and hair, the latter graying slightly at the temples.  Perhaps the familiarity I felt was simply that he fit my idea of how a well-heeled middle-aged gentleman should look.

I squirted Windex at the huge mirror behind the refreshment counter, furtively watching the man’s reflection.  Without lifting his eyes he slowly moved a sun-browned hand to a black trench coat lying on the seat beside him and took a silver cigarette case from one of its pockets.  Then he pulled out a lighter… not a plastic disposable but a hefty little chunk like a Dupont or a Dunhill.  Suddenly he looked directly at me and, feeling a flush come to my face, I fell to buffing the mirror with exaggerated care.  Should I say something? He must have seen me eying him.

“I made fresh coffee,” I blurted out, unnerved by the stranger’s sober gaze. “Would you care for a cup?”

The man lit his cigarette, one of those acrid smelling French things.  He puffed smoke, slid scholarly looking reading glasses down the bridge of his angular nose and quietly cleared his throat.

“Thank you, yes; that would be nice.”

“How do you take it?” I asked with forced geniality.  For some reason I expected him to order it black but he asked for it creamy ― “With a little extra sugar!”  I set a clean cup in a saucer and took another glance in the mirror as I turned to the coffee maker; his reflection was watching me.

“The south-bound is gone,” I said; “Nothing will be through here for some time, not counting the one-oh-five fast freight.”

He folded his newspaper, then his glasses and laid them on the paper.  Leaning back in his chair he passed a well-manicured hand over obviously tired eyes.

“I imagine it will be here soon enough,” he said, a little pensively.

Outside the rain paused and a watery moon crept from behind tattered clouds into a patch of indigo sky.  I wondered again about the man’s familiar look and decided to take a stab at it:

“Haven’t you been here before?”  The dash of cream I’d put in his coffee made a little whorl.

“You’re very observant,” he said, and for the first time I noticed the hint of an accent.  The legs of his chair scraped noisily on the floor as he stood and started forward, negotiating his way around the furniture to stop directly in front of me.  “I came this way once before but it’s been a while.”

He was quite tall and athletic-looking, and I made an attempt at what I hoped was a disarming smile ― though I wished I’d had a gun hidden somewhere close.  The coffee cup rattled in its saucer as I slid them across the counter.

“No charge,” I said, my heart in my mouth; “You’re our millionth customer.”

A smile brought friendly wrinkles to the corners of dove-colored eyes, and he spoke in a tone cool as stream water.

“Please; you need not be alarmed young lady,” he said. Nevertheless my heart raced.

“Oh?” I bleated.

“I’m old enough to be your grandpa,” he chuckled, “and feeling none too nimble right now.”  My anxiety eased a bit;

“I get some real characters in here sometimes and, well… you know.”

The man crushed out his smoke in an ashtray and, squaring his shoulders a little, extended a hand across the counter.

“My name is Kirby Roush,” he said; “May I know yours?”

I flopped my hand out like a wet fish and swallowed almost audibly.  “Sylvia Malone; my friends call me Coco.”

He laughed softly; “Enchanté, Mademoiselle Coco.”  Then gently taking my hand he bowed slightly and began to lift my flaccid fingers toward his face.

“Oh God!” I thought; “He’s gonna kiss my friggin’ hand!”  But he didn’t.  Releasing it he picked up his coffee and turned away.  My stupid hand hung in the air.

Thunder growled nearby as Kirby Roush returned to his table, chair creaking sharply as he sat.  I busied myself with side-work as rain again began seeping through the skylight to drip and puddle on the cracked linoleum.  I glanced at the man more openly.

He sipped his coffee, holding the cup handle almost delicately between finger and thumb with his pinky raised like a little antenna and the other hand cradling the saucer a few inches below his chin.  I wondered incongruously if the posture was meant to demonstrate good breeding or merely showed a simple desire to avoid dripping coffee on his tie.

“You picked a rotten night to travel,” I said; “There’s a storm-warning for the whole east coast.”  He rested his cup carefully in its saucer and gave a faint smile.

“Yes,” he said, looking up at the roiling clouds outside the window. “Thank goodness for trains; I’ve always hated flying in this.”

We exchanged banter about the weather for a couple of minutes before the conversation lagged and I retreated behind the counter.  A squall carried the distant wail of the approaching freight train.  “What kind of business are you in?” I asked, looking up.

But Kirby Roush was gone.  As I tidied his table I noticed the headline of the newspaper he’d left.  It read: “Train wreck demolishes station.”

A single chime of the ancient wall clock marked the passing of the first hour of Friday, October thirty-first.

If He Squeals

My sister-in-law Sylvie had a way of showing up at family functions way too early and most often already half drunk; such was the case on the fourth of July, 1999. Looking back I think she may have been the only sane one in the entire bunch. Maybe I can write it now; it was too hard then, I’d get a knot in my gut the size of a Volkswagen and feel like throwing up.

The rituals took place in Huntington Beach, California at the home of my other sister-in-law Frances. After exchanging obligatory air-kisses she and my wife Doris would verbally pussyfoot around each other looking for an opening. Thirty-odd years of practiced rivalry made this thrust-and-parry seem endless.
Guests usually consisted mostly of other siblings, also with incendiary attitudes learned from birth, who frequently started squabbles which often became quarrels that had been known to degenerate into real fights. Anyone would think they hated each other.

Youngest brother Jon and his significant-other, Sue, brought twins Sam and Eric; products of one of Sue’s previous marital disasters who usually ricocheted around until swatted then hid in a closet until it was time to leave. Frances detested Sam and Eric and not surprisingly their father, who was serving eighteen-to-life in Soledad prison for killing some other drug dealer. Whenever his name came up in conversation Frances would bustle off mumbling something like, “He’s the kind of guy that gets niggers a bad name”.

Jon and Sue met over a roulette wheel in Bullhead City, Arizona where she was a croupier in a riverside casino. Jon past-posted a bet; a practice whereby a cheater surreptitiously switches chips of higher value for smaller ones after the little ball stops rolling. The inscrutable Sue wasn’t fooled but paid off Jon’s bet without raising an alarm, in return for which she made him bonk her vigorously for several hours. A couple of days later she quit her job at the casino, bundled up the toddling twins and drove her failing Oldsmobile to San Bernardino where Jon had told her he ran a thriving Harley Davidson dealership. The whirlwind romance took a bit of a hit when it became clear he was a lowly mechanic somewhat lacking in recognizable personal virtues, but the sex and drugs were plentiful enough that Sue hung-in there anyway.

Older brother Barry brought wife Mickey, short for Michaela. The six-foot seven-inch tall Barry owned up to being a spy. Once after he’d gone missing for several days Mickey phoned Doris one night in the wee-small hours to say he’d called from the Azores or somewhere similarly remote…Tierra Del Fuego? Casual as the guy was about his anonymity I suppose Barry was either a very bad spy or an extremely good one. Frances’ Mexican gardener said Barry’s face was “Big: Like a horse”.

Besides being married Barry and Mickey were in business together selling surveillance and security devices… Barry’s ‘cover’. She, a travelling rep for a burglar alarm manufacturer in San Francisco, fell for Barry right away; the similarly smitten Barry closed up the store and together they jetted off to Grand Bahama, returning a week later hitched.

Parents Henry and Marjorie were long and no doubt blissfully dead, thus having the only acceptable excuse for not showing up at Frances’ perennial soirées. When the kids were young Hank and Marge were so often preoccupied with chiding each other that Barry and Frances more or less ran the show.
After visiting at least one of his favourite watering holes Dad would come home from work at the General Dynamics plant in Verona, CA and resume the customary fault-finding he’d begun that morning. Marge would keep him off the kid’s backs by steering him to the wet bar in the den and in due course pour him into bed.

Following mom’s death Barry joined the Marines and Frances assumed the role of matriarch, while dad floated away on the eighty-proof waters of oblivion. It was while making his funeral arrangements that Frances met Gary… a mortician.

Though he was not really looking for a wife Gary’s funeral home sported enough oak and brass that his marriage to Frances was soon a done-deal: She was very into the oak and brass thing. Daughter Chastity was conceived on the floor of the viewing chapel with the bride still in her wedding gown.

Sylvie considered herself to be a hopeless romantic… her words, but a penchant for switching lovers with the frequency some people change their bed linen hinted that Sylvie’s condition was more of the obsessive-compulsive kind. She also expressed it as a taste for strong drink.

Drinking had been a favourite pastime for Sylvie since childhood, when cocoa was her beverage of choice. Marge made it on school nights but Sylvie wanted cocoa all the time and started making herself huge mugs of it laced with enough sugar to stun a small horse. Barry began calling her Coco and it stuck.

Determined to become a painter Coco managed to win a scholarship to Pittsburgh Art Institute, where she learned to her chagrin that [a] Life for most artists is a constant struggle, [b] Fame almost always stays two weeks away and [c] Pregnancy can be terminated with lots of gin and hot baths. She married fellow student Donovan Malone who accidentally took a fatal overdose of Methaquaalone and Beaujolais before Coco got the chance to tell the world about her new husband.

In those days I was a musician enjoying something like life in the Pittsburgh jazz scene and home was a rented apartment in a converted north-side warehouse. Coco and Donovan were my neighbours across the hall. After Don died I did what I could to console his widow; we compared past misfortunes, for which we were naturally blameless, and I learned she wasn’t one for small talk. The look she gave me on Frances’ patio over a half empty glass of Chivas Regal was pretty graphic; it said, “We need to talk.”

I strolled over with feigned nonchalance.

“There’s somebody here I don’t know,” she said as if a little piqued. “That guy over there by the pool: Who’d he come with?”
For a second I wondered if Frances had arranged for an ugly Hawaiian shirt competition as part of the afternoon’s revelries, if so its easy winner stood beside the pool swizzling his drink and scanning the scene through reflective shades.  I said I didn’t know who he was but that I thought he looked a little nervous… Furtive even. Coco was already edging towards the patio steps. “Someone should check him out,” she said, tossing her ash blond hair the way ash blond airheads do. That was the last I saw of her for two weeks.

One day while downtown hounding my literary agent I ran into Coco at a sidewalk cafe. She was breakfasting on Danish pastries and latte and looking very L.A. Bohemian in a wrap skirt over a backless swimsuit, sunglasses, Huarache sandals and a shabby-chic straw hat.  I sat, and in lieu of a less hackneyed greeting said “Hi stranger; where’d you disappear to the other day?”

“Oh, hi!” she said, hiding a crumb-garnished smile behind slender fingers.
“You went to Ojai?”  I quipped.
“No, silly; Stephen and I flew to New York.”
“Stephen? Don’t tell me… the Hawaiian shirt guy?”
“The same,” she said coyly.

A large waiter arrived and I ordered a Pepsi. “Ve haf no Pepsi,” he lisped in Anglo-Transylvanian; “Coke?”  I nodded. He minced off.

“How was the trip?’ I asked; “Seems to have agreed with you.” The woman was undeniably beautiful despite being something of a lush.
“Terrific,” she said; “You want this other Danish?”  The morning rush was over and the lunch-crunch beginning to build. “Downtown’s not bad this time of day,” said Coco, oblivious to the world grinding by so close to our little cast iron table. “But you wouldn’t wanna be here after office hours… they hose the place down to keep the bums out”.

I didn’t want to be steered away from the Stephen thing. “How come your buddy was at Frances’ party?”
Coco shot me a rueful look over her Foster-Grants. “Hey, pops;” she said flatly, “I’m all growed up now.” With a middle finger she pointedly repositioned her sunglasses.
“Ok, I’m chastised,” I said, “But you know there’s weirdos out there.”

The waiter returned with my drink as Coco dismissed my concerns with a shrug.
“I can take care of myself,” she said. “Anyway, Stephen and I go way back: I didn’t recognize him at first but we were at Pittsburgh Art Institute together. He found me in the phonebook; my service forwarded his call to Frances and Gary’s and Gary invited him over.”  A seamless explanation.  “And,” she continued, struggling to control an outburst of girlish delight; “He wants me to do some paintings for his gallery in Lawnguyland!”

I figured my sister-in-law was simply parroting her friend’s pronunciation of Long Island with her usual beguiling naiveté.

Rites Of Passage

There are landmarks in life’s journey; events and experiences sometimes described as rites-of-passage. Perhaps the most seminal of these occur in early childhood with the recognition of our own separate-ness. This signals the evolving capability to conceptualize, the characteristic which may above all define our humanity.

Whereas in our baby-ness it was once all we could do to react to hunger, or register the difference between darkness and light, the new view became key to understanding how we might respond to our world and enable us to successfully DO stuff rather than merely BE.

“The Journey” remained something we might explore later, or on the other hand not begin to wonder if ‘self’ were the imperishable core of identity, and yadda-yadda-yadda. In any event we came to accept that we needed to press on and take care of business. Life continues to be pocked with moments-of-clarity, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous; nevertheless such illuminating events don’t always dispelled our fears as quickly as we might like.