DFL POST-GESTALT FICTIONS - part 3

 THE MACARONI PEOPLE

The Macaroni People did exist in fashionable eighteenth century history, but enough of them! You can look them up. This single mention is more than enough. I want to talk about the Macaroni People today or, as some call them, the Macaroni Madness, even the Macaroni Miracle, depending on one’s point of view. ‘Elbow Pasta’  — look this up, too! — is a form of Macaroni. Yet, when, in these days, politicians tend to be straight up and down, or soft in the middle, either divisive or all-embracing, it’s important to get terminology right. Covered in cheese. Or with sugar and raisins, as a more wiggly form of the rice pud one was given in the old school canteen. Macmillan was prime minister then. And he said we never had it so good. Well, I begged to differ. Now I begin to agree.

Only last night I was visited by figures on wobbly stilts and they sported what I can only call macaroons as heads. In the days of the Lyon’s Corner House, such cakes were part of the choice on silver tiered cakestands that stood among the teapot and teacups, when listening to the Max Jaffa ensemble in the corner of the room, a corner with a small c. A house made of corners, and cream cornets as companions for the macaroons. The architecture outside had  a frontage of leering mascarons (look the latter up on Wikipedia!) 

Indeed, Lyons without lions, just rows of gurning masks. And the Macaroni Medley played on mandolins for the teatime customers to swoon at. The clink of cup and saucer just one ingredient to accompany the arrival on stage of living mannequins upon taller, sturdier stilts, more like uncooked spaghetti than al dente manicotti. The scrape of chalk on some hidden blackboard made me think of the school canteen again, and the miniature dumplings that were often as hard as bullets.  Treacle tart was only just around the corner. Daydreaming with a small d is never the same as being back in the Good Old Days for real. Towards the end of my life, I often soar with my eyes into the sky to see the true epiphany of Macaroni Madness as the shapes of people wavering like shadows with loose olecranons, miraculously as high as the clouds are. Look up at them!

***

THE LITHOGRAPH

It was difficult for Don to judge whether it configured a single face or two human figures standing up in a boat ready to dive into the sea. Whatever the case, by evidence of its feel to Don’s fingers, he sensed it was a lithograph not a print. More suitable for a vibrant ghost story than an exercise in surface pareidolia.  The meaning of the ‘p’ word just used by Don  — opaque to many — was a portal to an inner depth below the surface, indeed a visualisation towards shapes of new meaning.

He shook his head. Whom was he talking to or writing for when expressing the above words? He placed in his mind’s eye a face of a stranger, a plain but strangely attractive female face, and the rest of his thoughts were addressed to that person whoever she was. Already, he somehow knew her and he believed that she knew him. Was she connected to the face he had first visualised in the near-abstract lithograph or maybe the two figures in the boat were connected to this woman in some story plot he had yet to be told by another person or by himself. The next question for Don was to wonder why he was referring to himself in the third person singular.

“Don, what’s the matter?”

The voice had not objectively come out of the blue. Equally, Don had completely forgotten that he was unalone in the cellar room, where candlelight struggled with the draughts from what he remembered as the coal bunker’s door to the outside. Thus he was duly startled by the sudden non-arrival of a ‘visitor from Porlock’. Non-arrival because the visitor had been present all along.  

Don felt the surface of the lithograph again, as if giving himself time to dwell on what his answer should be. This action served to give his hand something to do instead of staring blankly into the other’s eyes. A reason for delay, to explain his stony silence, while seeking his answer amidst the aged undulations of the lithograph’s design and its ink’s mineral contents. Some of the random scratches of wear and tear seemed part of the design that he had tried to fathom by a combination of an independent pareidolia and  the whimsy of a ghost story he had simultaneously told himself. Scored lines on dark draughty walls, he somehow thought. Light that was managed by means other than candles.

“Nothing is the matter, my dear.” 

Although it was his answer, he realised it wasn’t his own voice. Nor were the voice’s words ones he even understood. The voice and the  words were more ancient than that, even neolithic. And the watery wavery light fell into a strangely strange darkness.

***

ANYTHING GOES, ANYTHING BUT

It was called Deep River, but it was anything but.
With a nightwatchman’s house little more than a hut,
A township where simply anything went,
And that meant its days of Truth and Consent.
And today much goes, simply everything goes,
And jolly townsfolk strode in espadrilles and finest hose.
But a rogue element set alight the night hutch house
And turned this jolly verse into unscanned and unrhymed prose.

You see, inland Deep River had a dry dock as its central point, to which no deep river led. Indeed, no river at all. This made no sense without a strong element of truth and consent. The fact that a huge ocean liner sat between the huge plinths of the dock’s work area, swarming with working hands, and proving that mind over matter actually served its purpose while the economies of scale in Deep River gave much to do for the mischief makers to be scorched free of their mischief and who might have otherwise torched the night hutch first. Busy hands keep contented minds, many claimed, keeping such hands themselves from being nasty hands. Yet, at least one rogue always existed in every community and this particular rogue thought that the nightwatchman had scored with his wife in the eponymous house that now lay in ashes near the dry dock. Not many ashes as it was still ever the remains of a hut or night hutch, not a night house at all. Just a few wispy flakes of ash beneath the towering dock. Never to be noticed unless someone remembered what such ashes once were. Since then, everything went. Even consensus became a mistaken rabbit hole into which truth vanished forever. Sill waters never run deep, never run even shallow. Metaphors mere empty hoses to hose down hulls or wheelhouses. At best, footwear as casually buckled flats not deep-shod shoes at all. 

Deep River was anything but what it wasn’t most.
The Night House the mere shimmer of a watery ghost.
And vast shapes come and go nightly from the dockside struts,
No-one woken to see them coming and going like tiny buts.

***

HOLD YOUR HORSES

Not that Boss Jenner knew anything about horses. He had never been near a horse, let alone groomed or ridden one. Yet, his favourite expression when facing someone who appeared to be acting impulsively was ‘hold your horses’ and then go on to explain why such metaphorical horses should thus be held. 

Imagine a situation, therefore, where Boss Jenner encountered a horse in real life completely beyond the context of what had transpired before such an encounter. Out of the blue, quite unpremeditated, he lurched  forward with his head, or his nose did if not the rest of his head. More a leaning motion than the presumed lurching, in hindsight. He could not believe his eyes as he caught sidewise his own reflection in what he later found out to be a Horse Mirror that was once common in certain areas of time when grooming. The nose was slowly stretching like a piece of abstract art worthy of preserving, had that been possible in those days. There was then no easy way of making permanent records of what one was constantly seeing moment by moment, as there was today. A series of static or stable images for posterity, either to incriminate felons or to award heroes. Even to make fine art from finding captures of the momentary and potentially momentous, a valued few of which clinchings or clickings could possibly be called monumental. Boss Jenner was ever to be part of such a framed cluster of splintered realities. One clinching in particular was being head to head with a horse, to the nature of which horse he had yet not been able to acclimatise himself. In racecourse parlance about close finishes, indeed, against the odds, a long head short of a nose.  

The stabilised pen is still poised enough to write more, had this not fallen short of a never-ending horror story, instead of a fleeting ghost story as it now teeters upon becoming. Even a novel given, in hindsight, the now arbitrary but apparently careful choice of the protagonist’s name of Boss Jenner, a name  that might have been intended for a novel stretched over time from start to finish. Fiction horseplay, it could be called. At optimum, a form of horse-trading between the art genres of literature and modern painting, but hopefully better than both, should time be allowed to quell  any wanton impulses by whoever wrote this.

***

WATCH FROM THE START

The invitation seemed more tempting than ‘Watch Live’.  Best to get at least a glimpse of the whole context in order to enjoy the middle and end. Hannah remembered the old days when cinemas regularly had continuous performances and one could enter and leave at whatever stage of the various screenplay storylines had been reached. It did not seem to matter, and, if Hannah agreed with my own views on this matter, one’s enjoyment and comprehension was not affected, in fact the middle-to-middle of some films was preferable to a beginning-to-end. Perhaps they once made films differently, fully expecting alternative timeloops in the audiences watching them.

In later years, with the arrival of VHS, I witnessed Hannah experimenting with the altering of the tapes so that she could watch old cinema  films backwards. Whether that soon became easier with DVDs was a moot point because, by then, she had ceased finding backwards viewing a novelty to cherish, but the act of reflecting the circling sun upon a coloured surface of unintended colours was an audacious eccentricity to wave in the face of prescribed tradition, and Hannah indulged such a sense of new things happening every day  to the extent of deliberately choosing to avoid internet streaming ab initio so she could end her life with something even newer. She created me. Complete with my own real memories of the past.

***

VIRGINIA CREEPER

Always wash your hands when preparing stuff for the kitchen oven; you don’t know what might have crept upon them. I sensed the Virginia Creeper was parthenogenetic and I had no duty to explain what I meant. I just knew it seemed to come from nowhere because it was not officially native to where I lived. And that it commonly climbed old buildings and some tall trees with its customary glow of redness in its leaves. I put out of my mind that it was poisonously inimical if one was careless with handling it and didn’t wash one’s hands thoroughly. No holds barred, my meanings are well hidden. No condescending to those who may read this tract purely in order to read the dubious existence of ghosts into every space between its printed lines. Even the sound of its words carried messages beyond their semantics.  If it is too hot in the kitchen, nobody is preventing you from leaving. The oven needs to be hot so as to do its job. And indeed the creeper is climbing in profusion across the mansion walls towards the roof like a veritable conflagration. The finale of a horror film or an arson committed for insurance purposes? No it was all part and parcel of Mimi’s attempts to explain the nature of the ghosts that creep along with the creeper. Subtle ways of imparting them into tenuousness from nowhere, like virgin births or accidental prompts for artificial intelligence, without, at the same time, having to be explicit. To be plain about them would make the ghosts vanish, and she wished to encourage them, even to the extent of using these attenuations as a means towards the ends of helping her with existential angsts about other impending terrors that were far worse than ghosts. Ghosts at least had some ‘promise’ embedded in their existence, a proof of an after-life if you need me to be plain and simple. Mimi on the other hand felt no such qualms, dressed in her red hat and purple clothes that she used for socialising with like-minded people. Redness always climbs to the top, she thought, except if it’s one’s birthday; she smiled at the thought. She hired me to translate into plainness her endeavours in subtlety so that she could get her point across, and, so, I masqueraded, hidden in even plainer sight, as it were, dressed like a Morris dancer, my head decked in red leaves with wooden batons to beat upon other dancers’ wooden batons as we made arcane patterns upon the lawns and struck rhythmic noises in even closer vicinity with Mimi’s mansion’s vision of a burnt-out shell. I hope you get out of the kitchen in time. Forget the hands.

Five new DFL fiction pieces (2)

 RUNWAY

Del Shannon inserted the A into the title before he sang his song and, once sung, sung again. And as Phoebe remembered the grooves of the disc flattening onto the revolving mat having fallen from the height of the autochanger’s elbow, she already hummed the organ’s solo interlude. Phoebe herself was the ultimate runaway, she felt, as she watched a simulation of an aircraft on the screen, a futuristic vehicle about to leave its own earthen grooves for the open skies. She threw herself open to the projection of self into a cockpit specially designed for those pilots who had not been taught how to control the dashboard properly. To be responsible for those souls aboard was a thought too far, as she shrunk back into her head, but any means of dispersal or, as they said in other places, diaspora, justified the ends. A dying planet was a dying planet, no getting away from it, she thought.

As the runway eventually formed its own vanishing-point perspective, she visualised rail tracks on either side, between which the river of airflows slowly became thermals and eventually buoyancy. But the rail tracks were real even if she wasn’t. There was a drag she couldn’t account for, and she remembered the crowds that had crammed into the seats in the hull behind her. Small boats were as nothing to this now spluttering beast she needed to tame. Time to withdraw from the simulation, before she found herself trapped. Shrieks behind her echoing  the constant “Why… why-why-why-why-why” of the engines.

Phoebe examined the autochange arm closely and imagined it as a close-up photograph of something artistically unrecognisable. Its bent elbow was now blurred like an unsightly floater in the eye, becoming a configuration much like an A. And the music was the all screaming, all shrieking organ solo and no singing.

***

WHEN THE DOGS HAVE GONE

The flower shop was not called a florist for some reason. The meat shop was euphemistically just that, although men in aprons with axes worked brutally in the back room. The medicine shop had large wholly decorative bottles of coloured liquid in its front window. The clothes shop boasted still-life mannequins galore. The seaside town of Tantton seemed neither in the past nor in the future. And its learning place ever thrived with fresh little ones to stock its desks. And other people arrived from outside called day trippers who still fell over themselves to come and see Tanntton’s sights. A shame most of them, though, arrived accompanied by awful barking shapes on temporary leads. 

The Tantton man called Arthur, who ran a food collection place he playfully called Chish and Fips, was ever busy with newspaper packages that seeped sour drips of salty brine. He even had special smaller portions for any visiting pets. But these were bigger than those packages offered for the little people more loosely towed in the wake of any longer strides. It was the way that Arthur spoke the words ‘the little people’ with a heavy Celtic lilt that made the holiday portals seem wider. He knew what he meant, and so, by sheer instinct, did many of his visiting customers. Those small fry called by that lilting expression, though, were often treated second class to the pets themselves, especially the now leaderless pets that kept on barking and dodging in and out of the Tantton residents’ feet! Residents who considered it likely that, in the various inland towns whence the trippers came, such ‘little people’ were few and far between, thus leaving  many of the desks quite bare. Inkwells empty, too.

Arthur relaxed as dusk settled and the trippers with their yappers had already boarded charabancs out of Tantton. He whistled as he locked up the door of Chish and Fips. He walked the silent streets.  He heard the distant cracking of bones in the meat shop even when those who worked there should have by now gone home, too. Such cracking often went on well past midnight. The flower shop was still open however, staffed by the apothecary who was moonlighting. Arthur decided to drop in and buy a posy for his dear patient wife. And a bottle of something or other that he claimed  was medicinal.

***

PICKLED FENNEL

I once heard this was a recipe from the French Revolution, but I could never confirm the authenticity of the reference. Such a crunchy thing seemed like anathema to me, anyway. A theme to be obviated by any means possible for fear of what it may lead either by real ascertainable connections or the capricious means of word association. 

Whichever way it was, the thoughts such algorithms evoked soon became a situation more fearful than a frayed ceiling confronting the lady who slept under it — fearing the ceiling’s flawed whiteness might be an actual ghost that she knew at heart could never exist. The click of knitting needles or what sounded to be a click of knitting needles from the opposite side of the otherwise empty bedroom did not help her trying to fall asleep. She was the sort of person who often stayed awake — not to count any sheep whence the knitting wool derived — but to count anxieties and, yes, fears.

There were commonly two kinds of knitting wool — morling and shorling wool, harvested respectively from dead sheep and live sheep. Respectfully done in either instance, she hoped. Half awake, half asleep, her thoughts became affected by both states in overlap, as she returned to the opening theme of pickled fennel. In her mind’s eye, meanwhile, she wound any wool-gathering into a tight ball of it from wide spools of wool, as she once did at the knees of her grandmother, a great knitter as well as a seamstress with a Singer machine. A woman now too old to be alive, having been born in 1899, long after the French Revolution, true, but before algorithms were invented for knitting patterns to be available on line in advance of reaching the needles. Jab jab jab went a smaller needle to the sound of feet on an ancient rusted treadle. The ash growing longer and longer on the cigarette in her mouth, as the old woman fed the material through with her fingers.

But that made no sense of the opening theme. Any coda needed a more difficult unravelling of the movements in the room around her so as to arrive back at the start. Some said ‘ravel’ and ‘unravel’ had the same meaning, but she had never understood that. Her mouth was now untidily crunchy with a strange spicy substance not unlike old chew-baccy. The Queen of Hearts smiled.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would.” – Alice in Wonderland

***

THE RETURN OF THE ROVERS

Corrie turned to her bestie and smiled. They were both needlewomen from the top drawer of hand-sewing. Skilful in the patches of make-do-and-mend for kids, more artistic embroidery and optimal vents in men’s tailored suits. But best of all they loved combining general knitting with their own psychological propensity towards cross-stitch. Quilting was still a no-no, though. But never say quit! Indeed, never say never, which makes a mockery of the first never!

The second lady stared across the room at Corrie and wondered why she never called her by her name. Maybe she feared getting the name of presidents mixed up. An in-joke that would soon grow stale. She could not possibly countenance the fact that a bestie like Corrie didn’t actually know her name. They had gone to school together, after all. But the mind in advancing age can play many tricks. Like the difference between stray cottonthreads and teased-out straggles and frayed edges and hung rovings. Those fiddly endings that often make a finished work so utterly un-neat. She often picked through remnants just to get them ready for Corrie and herself to make-do-and-mend  as well as to optimise into finer handiwork. She pulled at the tantalising tassels and tortuous tags. Her teeth bit and tugged at resistant ravels and those everpresent rovings. The latter seemed to spread as soon as look at them, moving like ladders did in nylon stockings, except here such ladders left their rungs behind like impediments in otherwise smooth skeins. Rovings become intrepid rovers.

As the clock struck suppertime, Corrie replaced her needles in the drawer marked seven. Her bestie’s needles lived at number nine. Next door neighbours, after all these years of so-so relations with each other as besties often have. But most of the time, by many a trick or treat, they got on. Their husbands, dressed in cast-offs,  waited for them at home. They had sat anxiously in threadbare armchairs for many years dreading the respective ghosts of their erstwhile widows to turn up their trousers again. The return of the rovers as ravelled in frayed sheets.

***

THE MACARONI PEOPLE

The Macaroni People did exist in fashionable eighteenth century history, but enough of them! You can look them up. This single mention is more than enough. I want to talk about the Macaroni People today or, as some call them, the Macaroni Madness, even the Macaroni Miracle, depending on one’s point of view. ‘Elbow Pasta’  — look this up, too! — is a form of Macaroni. Yet, when, in these days, politicians tend to be straight up and down, or soft in the middle, either divisive or all-embracing, it’s important to get terminology right. Covered in cheese. Or with sugar and raisins, as a more wiggly form of the rice pud one was given in the old school canteen. Macmillan was prime minister then. And he said we never had it so good. Well, I begged to differ. Now I begin to agree.

Only last night I was visited by figures on wobbly stilts and they sported what I can only call macaroons as heads. In the days of the Lyon’s Corner House, such cakes were part of the choice on silver tiered cakestands that stood among the teapot and teacups, when listening to the Max Jaffa ensemble in the corner of the room, a corner with a small c. A house made of corners, and cream cornets as companions for the macaroons. The architecture outside had  a frontage of leering mascarons (look the latter up on Wikipedia!) 

Indeed, Lyons without lions, just rows of gurning masks. And the Macaroni Medley played on mandolins for the teatime customers to swoon at. The clink of cup and saucer just one ingredient to accompany the arrival on stage of living mannequins upon taller, sturdier stilts, more like uncooked spaghetti than al dente manicotti. The scrape of chalk on some hidden blackboard made me think of the school canteen again, and the miniature dumplings that were often as hard as bullets.  Treacle tart was only just around the corner. Daydreaming with a small d is never the same as being back in the Good Old Days for real. Towards the end of my life, I often soar with my eyes into the sky to see the true epiphany of Macaroni Madness as the shapes of people wavering like shadows with loose olecranons, miraculously as high as the clouds are. Look up at them!

Four New DFL Prose Pieces (1)

 DEEP RIVER

At what possible junction of truth and fiction could that river have been called deep? It had flowed past my boyhood home for longer than I care to remember or indeed CAN remember. They say memory only starts at the age of two and half. But I guess that differs from person to person. My memory was slightly before that — a vision of my grandmother in a black apron about to give me a bath, when my mother was in hospital. It was the black colour that pervaded all the other details that a painter would have meticulously added to the main blob of black. The painter would have got the lighting just right and the bathroom cabinet just to the left, and the sound of the river flowing past. There ARE sounds in paintings, if the painter is clever enough to convey them by brushstrokes. However, I guess it was not a river at all but the bathwater flowing into the bath that I could hear. The bath seemed very deep in those days, with everything being in black and white when trying to remember those days through the filter of how the 1950s are now depicted, unless someone has cleverly colourised the images flickering across the screen. Not only a deep bath, but made of cast iron or whatever they made baths from in those days. My first real full-fledged memory, however, was a different bath when we moved from that large house with the water flowing from my grandmother’s taps and lived in a smaller place whereby we had then to make do with a thinner tin bath that was hung battered on the wall ready to take down for filling with kettles of hot water. The day we moved there, was after the night of the great storm in 1953 and there was a veritable river flowing outside in the street from the nearby backwaters and a dinghy floated past our front door. The lower floors of our new abode were now flooded. I remember it all now in detail, but my palette still only has two colours, black and white. Life itself is a river that flows under a bridge, as the old saying goes. Whether deep or shallow depends on you. The strips of plasticine at infants’ school were my first real memories of colour. But the sea remained grey, as wide as it was deep. And its currents ebbed and flowed as tidal waves, rather than the onward travelling of water in a deep channel between two banks from a river’s source towards just such an open sea. All is now black, but can I possibly have future memories of that blackness? And who will hang it back on the kitchen wall?

THE WATER STRIDER

When rivers widen beyond ken they call them broads, do they not?  Islands of land and islands of water. Isthmuses between. Tom was certain he would be able explore every diversion of route within the area where he had chosen for a trip in a single-steered craft,  a certainty that had endured until he was already three miles up a branch of the broads at the point when he realised he had gone off any map he could find in the pack of dog-eared charts given to him at the towpath station or even on-line, an on-line signal that was now significantly fading just as he was off line in more ways than one. He hummed a self-composed song to himself which he had entitled  ‘when rivers widen’ and contained a reference to certain narrows that broadened.  He had never hummed it before or even knew the song at all, until he hummed it now, as if some ghostly muse hovering over the sparkling water either side of his craft was instilling it into his brain. ‘When sidetracks deepen and atolls shrink’ were further words he imagined whereby even Paul Robeson’s voice would not be deep enough to cover the song’s demands. Any deep river or dream archipelago, three miles up was as nothing to the distance down Tom had actually gone.

Those back at the towpath station scratched their heads as the dusk drew in. Tom had hired the craft for a single day of exploring the broads, and so he was not officially allowed to moor somewhere overnight.  The stevedores and other workers had gathered after securing various craft already returned by their hirers, and they felt frissons of dread as a weather front approached that had never been forecast by those meteorologists they depended upon for organising trips on such dangerous waters. A low depression that deepened even as they watched. Blackening clouds seemed to reflect, like shadows, the land and water patterns below them that such towpath workers otherwise knew well from their own maps. But one such cloud was new in such a pattern of islands. And they heard  a song upon the heat of freshening gusts that came off the sheen of each mirrored surface they envisaged, if subconsciously. They only hoped Tom had reached an island to weather the storm. But the song’s words told otherwise, and so they turned it into a sea shanty at the next convivial gathering they attended, as a sort of purging.   But nobody had a voice deep enough for the notes required.

I met Tom years later. He had no memory of these events. He looked at me askance for having made him part of them. It was then I realised that I had at last met the man whose muse I was. I became, at last, able to exorcise any further widening of my powers into narrative channels that I should never now, in hindsight, have entered.  Able, too, to hover now where I pleased without guilt of infecting others. Striding the pattern of waters, straddling them as they swelled from hip to hip, to the sound of a silent song sung not by me but to me.

 

BALFOUR BROGUES

 

Henry Balfour did not have four feet but he sometimes thought he had four legs. Hands served as extra feet as he crawled across the carpet ‘on all fours’, as the saying goes, between his dolls house and toy military fortress. Each day he had to make a choice of which structure he would play with most, but the imagination he needed to grant realism to his games with either of them remained the same. Projecting versions of himself to inhabit the tiny human models of those who thus inhabited the structures around them.

His mother seemed to understand his so-called behaviour, but his father failed to do so. A father who wore the fashionable brown brogues of the age. A man who was missing most days while conducting unknown business concerns in the city to which he commuted by steam. Why shoes needed perforations was beyond Henry’s ken, but he guessed his father was too rich to need much shelter from the rain. Shelters simply went with his father wherever he needed such shelters to be. Leaky shoes were not an issue, especially, as Henry soon learnt, when the shoes’ perforations were actually water-proof decorations for sake of a male version of  vanity.  A working-class vanity, where being rich was something worth the pride of any ambitious man. Henry’s instincts were large despite his small size. If the cap fitted, wear it.

He stared from under the dining table towards his two game ‘zones’, and wondered what would happen if the dolls house went to war with the fortress, or, more likely, if the latter went to war with the former, full knowing that it would win with greater fire power. Talking of fires, the coal grate across the other side of the room cracked and spluttered with the firewood that helped to ignite the black mountains beside which Henry Balfour would soon crawl on all fours when choosing which ‘game’ was today’s main one. He looked at his hands and smiled ruefully, as he listened to his mother sieving the flour in the nearby kitchen. He somehow knew he was later to be told, along with his mother, that his father had been killed by a falling roof slate in a part of the city where nobody could understand why he was there at all. Some men are rogues, some not. They would leave different sized holes for someone’s memory to fill. Or so this type of men at least did hope.

Henry decided to declare war straightaway. His four hands and feet scuttled past the now roaring fire, back and forth between the combatants. 

 

RAGGED BOTTOM

Victorian kids were often said to have such a ‘ragged bottom’, as did kids even up to the 1950s just after the Second World War. Today, their bottoms are perhaps even more ragged making accounting-system columns in food banks as well as real banks even more unsure, wavering with double lines of figures broken in different places. The typesetting term with the same name, however, prevails separately. What is certain, meanwhile, is that the term ‘ragged bottom’ refers to the clothes on a bottom, not the bottom itself. Mothers, these days, sadly, are no longer seamsters, let alone tailors. 

Victorian writers often used the term ‘ragged bottoms’ for waifs and strays, but the famous novel ‘Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’ of Robert Tressel neatened the thoughts as well as the paragraphs of later writers.  Meantime, the Victorian kids needed to be of the male persuasion to allow the term ‘ragged bottom’ to be used effectively.  The more classically feminine apparel, I guess, is more difficult to imagine as creating a ‘ragged bottom’ as such. Ragged  stockings, perhaps, and, when push came to shove, laddered nylons, too, and indeed ragged frocks, but not ragged bottoms. The typesetting of prose such as this, it is to be hoped, will not end up ragged. But that remains to be seen when it is finally imprinted on paper.

Tom, an urchin of the first water, certainly wore  clothes as if he were the Platonic Form of a ‘ragged bottom’ when he followed in the wake of  the cat’s meat man pulling his cart, an old soul who was locally known as Blasphemy Fitzworth in the ancient London streets with his customary costermongering cry of “Gout cat, spout cat, watch the whiskers sprout, cat!” The kids, however, only knew him by the shortened name of Feemy. Tom’s younger sister Lettuce was also part of the gang that scavenged scraps from Feemy’s trade routes, dressed as neat as their mother could possibly make her. Pride halved was better than no pride at all.

Amidst all the trials and tribulations and the passing generations, Tom was ever to be seen tucking his shirt tails neatly into his tattered trousers — as if he was determined, against all the odds, not to become a certain future prime minister. But, instead, he yearned to be the would-be representative of voluntary goodwill through all direct histories and alternate worlds, and, as a token of his ambitions, he looked out for his sister and gave her the best scraps. ‘Bless Feemy’, he said, silently, almost like a prayer, as he watched the old man set out his wares on the trestle table that the meat-cart had become. The neatest ending that could be managed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOLAGE by N. Ashley (PALIMPSEST 7)

 

About nullimmortalis

Writer and Publisher Weirdmonger, Nemonymous etc

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