Archive for the 'Prose' Category

One day long long ago, in the bloom of youth, I was at the seaside, tarrying on a pier, fresh from a game of crazy golf and sucking an ice lolly. The sky was overcast and seabirds were screeching. I had decided, when once I was done with my lolly, to return to the dilapidated boarding house where I was staying with my parents and siblings, to fetch my swimming trunks and a towel, and then to go a-splashing in the sea. But as I leaned against the railings on the pier, sucking away, I was accosted by an elderly gent. He gave off a stink of kippers and brine and his huge hairy beard was riddled with fishbones. He leaned against the railings next to me, and pointed out to sea.

“Look, sonny,” he said, “What do you see?”

I looked in the direction of his pointing finger and could just make out, in the sea-mist, the shape of a ship, half way to the horizon.

“I see a ship,” I said.

“Aye, ’tis a ship indeed,” said the old sea dog, “And can you tell me the basic constituent parts of, say, a wooden ship?”

“I’ll try my best,” I said, for I was biddable and eager to please, “Sternpost, keel, false keel or shoe, fore foot or gripe, stem, headpiece, garboard strake, bottom planking, side planking, wale, sheer strake, covering board, bulwark, rough-tree rail, topgallant bulwark, rudder, counter, stern, chain plates, cathead, figurehead, mizzenmast, mainmast, foremast, and… oh… there’s one part on the tip of my tongue.”

The old tar stuffed a gobbet of salt taffy into his mouth and chewed on it, looking at me with a twinkle in his eye.

“Bowsprit!”, I cried, triumphantly.

“Good lad,” he said, “But what if I asked you to name three different types of parrel and their constituent parts?”

“Golly!”, I said, and after a moment’s thought, babbling, I listed what I could recall. “Well, first, a parrel with cleats on a wooden yard, you’d have topmast, yard, wooden cleats, a half-iron hoop served with leather, pins forming hinges to open the parrel, an iron band to take the tie, and iron straps and bolts securing the parrel to the yard. But if you had a tub parrel for an iron yard, then there would be topmast, yard, tub divided in halves, iron binding for same, gooseneck bolt, iron bands to take parrel and tie, yoke for the parrel, yoke for the tie, and eye bolt for the quarterblock. Thereagain, with a parrel sliding on a T-bar in a big ship, I would say topmast, topsail yard, T-bar, slide, two-way coupling, tie, connecting chain keeping slide in place, and last but by no means least, eye bolts for quarterblocks, captain. Should I call you captain?”

“It is many a long year since I served as a captain, my boy,” he said, “But tell me, if you cobbled together a topsail yard, parrel, rolling spar, iron drum end of the rolling spar, yardarm hoop, arm carrying the reefing halliard block, cheek block for topgallant sheet, parrel crutch with lignum vitae rollers, lignum vitae rollers, topsail, lead block for reefing halliards, and topsail yardarm, what would you have?”

I rubbed my chin to demonstrate that I was thinking carefully, as Darbyshire does, in imitation of Mr Carter, in the books by Anthony Buckeridge.

“I think,” I said, “No, I know… you’d have Colling’s and Pinkney’s patent self-reefing topsail, would you not?”

“You would indeed,” said the ancient mariner, and he spat his salt taffy into the sea.

I waited for his next question.

“I wonder if you can tell me,” he said, “About a four-masted barque.”

“Easy peasy,” I said, but too quickly, because with a glint of impatience, he snapped:

“Not just any four-masted barque, lad, but a particular one! Tell me everything you know about the Herzogin Cecilie!”

I gulped, and took a last suck on what was left of my ice lolly.

“Well,” I began, haltingly, “The Herzogin Cecilie, the Herzogin Cecilie… Ah, I think that was a four-masted barque built in 1902 by Rickmers shipyard at Bremerhaven for the Norddeutscher Lloyd at Bremen. It was a big sailing vessel of three thousand, two hundred and forty-two gross tons or four thousand, three hundred and fifty dw. She was a good sailer and made many excellent voyages. During World War One she was interned at Coquimbo in Chile. After the war, she brought a cargo of bauxite to Ostend, and… no, not bauxite, it was a cargo of nitrate. At Ostend she was allocated to the French government. In November 1921 she was purchased by Gustaf Erikson, Mariehamn, Finland, and under his flag was employed chiefly in the Australian grain trade. She foundered on 25 April 1936 off Salcombe in Devonshire, after running aground in heavy fog.”

“Tiptop Herzogin Cecilie information,” said the sea dog, beaming at me, “Now, just one more question. How many jibs did she have?”

“I would say three,” I replied, “An inner jib, an outer jib, and a flying jib.”

“And you would be right to say so,” he said, “But now our conversation is at an end.”

“Oh,” I said, a little downcast, “I think that must be the first time I have had a ship-related conversation with no mention at all of poop or orlop decks.”

“Don’t you worry,” he said, “You will be having plenty more ship-related conversations in the decades to come, for you have passed my rigorous tests and I am going to press-gang you into the service of the king’s navy.”

And so saying, he suddenly gave me a great shove and pushed me over the railings and I splashed into the sea. I was picked up by a rowing boat sent from the wooden ship he had pointed out to me, in the distance, now wholly enshrouded in sea-mist. And into that mist I was rowed, by a crew of hefty silent rowers, until the ship loomed huge ahead, and looking back I could no longer see any trace of the the pier, and the shore, and the dilapidated boarding house where my parents and siblings waited for me.

Drive to the forest in a Japanese car. When it begins to rain, and it will, it will, turn on the windscreen wipers. They will swish swoosh swish back and forth across the windscreen of the Japanese car, just like they do across the windscreen of Marion Crane’s car in Psycho, to ensure that, however heavy and pelting the rain becomes, and it will pelt, it will, you will still be able to see the road ahead clearly enough to drive, in the dark and the rain, past Box Hill, towards the forest, in a Japanese car.

Sometimes the rain pelts down so relentlessly that even the swishiest and swooshiest of windscreen wipers, set to their most rapid swishing and swooshing, are barely able to wipe the raindrops from the windscreen, so hard and fast does the rain pelt down, and in the dark of an earthly night it can be the devil of a job to keep a clear view of the road ahead. Such were the circumstances that led Marion Crane to stop at the Bates Motel. Her car was not a Japanese one. She was not on her way to the forest.

I’ve got binoculars on top of Box Hill. I am protected from the relentless pelting rain by an anorak, a sou’wester, and the roof of a bird-spotter’s hideyhole. Because my shelter is dry, more or less, and my vision is acute, I can see clearly through the lenses of my binoculars. I would not need wipers even were the binoculars fitted with them, which of course they are not. I have trained my binoculars on the road below, and now you come sweeping into view, driving to the forest in a Japanese car. I slowly adjust the angle of the binoculars so I can follow your progress.

It is not clear whether there was a hill, like Box Hill, in the vicinity of the Bates Motel, but had there been, then Arbogast might have been stood atop it, with binoculars, watching Marion Crane pull in and park. The private detective would have had plenty of time to scamper down the hillside and jump into his car and rev the engine and tear across to the Bates Motel and forestall the horror. Arbogast was not there, on some putative hill, with binoculars. But I am.

The windscreen wipers of your Japanese car are swishing and swooshing back and forth as rapidly as it is possible for them to do, but now the relentlessness of the pelting rain redoubles, and it is almost impossible for you to see clearly the road ahead, towards the forest. You are driving more and more slowly, and with increasing difficulty, and a voice in your head tells you to pull over and stop in a layby. The voice is a sober and sensible one and not at all like the voice Norman Bates hears in his head, when Marion Crane comes to the Bates Motel.

Through my binoculars, on top of Box Hill, I can see you have pulled in to a layby and come to a stop in your Japanese car. I tuck the binoculars into the pochette on a lanyard around my neck and I scamper down Box Hill to where my own car is parked. It is not a Japanese car. Its windscreen wipers are no more, nor less, efficient than yours, but my vision is acute and I am a fantastic driver, so for me it is child’s play to rev the engine and tear across to the layby where you are parked.

I pull up behind your Japanese car and stop the engine and get out of my car and slam the door shut behind me and splosh through the puddles towards your car. I am wearing waterproof boots. I draw level with the window on the driver’s side of your Japanese car and, peering in, I am disconcerted to see that you are not sitting in the driver’s seat. Nor have you shifted to the passenger seat, nor to either of the back seats. You are not in the car. You must have gone somewhere on foot, through the puddles, in the dark, in the pelting rain, while I was making my way to the layby from the top of Box Hill.

I stand next to your Japanese car and take the binoculars out of the pochette on a lanyard around my neck and peer through them. So relentless is the pelting rain that I wish O I wish I had wipers fitted to my binoculars. I cannot see a thing in any direction. I can only assume that for some reason you have sploshed through the puddles to the forest, the edge of which is about half a mile away. I decide to follow you, in my waterproof boots.

This is ancient and dense forest and no felling has taken place to make a clearing in which a motel might be erected. It would not, in any case, make an apt site for a motel. A sinister house like that adjoining the Bates Motel might be apt, were there a clearing, but there is not. So to find you I have to seek signs, like a tracker. Soon enough, I come upon you, squatting by a fallen log, upon which you have set a camping gaz stove. You are preparing tea, and sausages. Along the log from the stove you have placed a cassette player.

“Hold it right there!” I cry.

You spin around, astonished.

“Picnic police!” I cry, “Don’t move!”

“Dammit!” you mutter.

There are some people who praise picnicking in the British countryside. I do whatever it takes to eradicate it. I place you under arrest. The cassette plays poptones.

Over the past seven days I have been posting pieces written in the twentieth century, so I feel I have had a week off from the Daily Essays project. Time, I think, to get back on board, and indeed to remind myself of the perpilocutionary impulse that pinged in my head at the start of the year. Then, the idea was very much to pluck a topic almost at random from the world’s storehouse of topics, and to bash out around a thousand words. As it has worked out, I have been pootling off in all sorts of other directions, and all that conceivably holds the year’s postages together is that (a) they are all roughly one thousand words in length, and (b) their titles all begin with the word “On”.

On Sunday the sixth of May, in the early afternoon, I find myself thinking of the following: Nikita Khrushchev, Kew. Rhone., mountaineering, and an ideal world where a jazz standard called Chutney On My Spats really does exist. I imagine it as an up-tempo Cab Calloway number, later adapted and slowed down and made beautiful and strange by Thelonius Monk or Miles Davis, and then, with added words – but what words? – being sung in arrangements by Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan. I don’t know much about jazz, so that last sentence is a pretty good example of perpilocution.

I am keen to stress, though I am not sure why, that those really are the topics bustling about in my brain this afternoon. It would have been easy enough for me to compile a quite different list, to pretend I was thinking about w and x and y and z, and you would never know. But what would be the point? Today, for reasons which are fairly clear to me, but which I will not go into here, the four topics I have listed are uppermost in my mind. What I suppose I ought to do is to pick one and then write about it, for a thousand words or so. But before doing that, I am reminded of a passage, somewhere in an essay by Nicholson Baker, where he tabulates the subjects he has been thinking about on a particular day. It is a long, long time since I read the essay, but if memory serves Mr Baker’s point is that his list of thoughts will be arrestingly different from the list of thoughts that, on the same day, go through the head of the person closest to him, in all ways, his wife – and that their closeness, their attachment to each other, is unaffected by the wildly different jumbles of things occupying their respective brains. That, at least, is what I remember.

This afternoon, as I say, I have arrived at having a head full of Nikita Khrushchev and Kew. Rhone. and mountaineering and Chutney On My Spats by processes I can clearly trace. It is, almost certainly – no, no, certainly, without doubt – the first time in my life that those four specific topics have jostled together inside my cranium. It may be the last time, too, though probably not, now that I have chosen to write them down, together in a list, and given that writing, that list, a life beyond the ephemeral, by posting it on Het Internet. Assuming that cataclysm does not deprive us of the power of electricity, and that international woman of mystery Primrose Dent does not press the big shiny red button that turns off Het Internet, then my list will be preserved, in the aether, forever and ever. One day in the far future, when we are all dead and gone and our children too are all dead and gone and their children too, and their children’s children, when untold generations have passed and humankind has evolved to that state familiar from any number of black and white science fiction films, where our descendants have huge heads and little or no hair, and they all dress in the same space age uniform, or in white robes, unless of course by that time they are merely brains in jars of bubbling fluid, with wiring attached, in that distant future it should still be possible for a person, or an enjarred brain, to access all the billions and billions of pages of Het Internet, and, while browsing in an aimless and desultory fashion, as I am sure they will, stumble upon Hooting Yard, quite by accident, and flick from page to page, from essay to essay, and alight, at last, without particular intention, upon this very piece, and read about Nikita Khrushchev and Kew. Rhone. and mountaineering and Chutney On My Spats, and thus those four separate, unrelated subjects, which just happen to be occupying my mind this afternoon, will occupy the huge pulsating advanced mind of the person or brain of the distant future, which is, I suppose, a kind of immortality.

It is an immortality not granted to whatever collection of gubbins bubbled to the surface of my conscious mind yesterday afternoon, or in the afternoon of the day before, because I did not record it. I did not make such a list. I did not tabulate, as Nicholson Baker did, one day late in the twentieth century, or early in this, I forget which. He made his list to demonstrate the distance, the distinctness, of his thoughts, from the thoughts of his closest companion. I made my list to contemplate my closeness to an unimaginable consciousness of an unimaginably distant future. My future reader – let’s call him, or her, or, by then quite possibly, it, Zagzob, or some such science fiction name – may have absolutely no idea who Nikita Khrushchev was, nor what Kew. Rhone. was, nor indeed have any concept of “mountaineering” as we do. After all, what with geological time, all the mountains might have been flattened, or Zagzob might be living in some kind of clean and gleaming artificial subterranean utopia, or, if there are still mountains, nobody will bother to climb them any more, having other leisure pursuits and adventuresome opportunities, ones we cannot even begin to guess at with our primitive mental blinkers. Zagzob will surely be utterly befuddled by Chutney On My Spats which, though I might dream, does not exist, and never has.

Although, of course, between now, the afternoon of the sixth of May 2012, and the afternoon in the far distant future when Zagzob reads these words, some jazz person of the future might indeed write the piece, and record it, and over the years it may be rerecorded untold times, in all sorts of arrangements and adaptations and versions, until it is considered a standard. It may even be that, as Zagzob scratches his or her or its gigantic pulsating hairless cranium in perplexity, wondering what a Nikita Khrushchev was, or who Kew. Rhone. was, or precisely how one might go about mountaineering, he or her or it, being a jazz buff, might be humming Chutney On My Spats, or indeed playing a version of it on their future Windows Vista Cranial Insertion Pod Hub device.

I find myself wondering if that is an accurate prediction of the far distant future, and hoping that it is so. Perhaps a science fiction writer can iron out the finer details.

Parts One, Two, and Three. And now, Part Four …

Buttercase’s map of Sumatra was his first and, arguably, finest cartographic achievement. Having abandoned his shipmates, his first step was to enter the general store in Blimbing, and, using the small sum of cash he had stolen from the purser’s hatbox, he bought a knapsack, some cakes, a compass, a shirt, a fetching little hat, a jar containing a substance no longer obtainable on earth, although it was quite common at the time, a guide-book, some clips, a lead-lined smock, and a windjammer, among other things. Then he set out on foot to cover the whole island. It took him five years. He began by keeping to the coastal routes, tramping from Blimbing all the way up to Oleleh, then along the eastern coast, through Edi, Balei, and Rupat until, once past Telok Betong, he returned to his starting-point. He took the opportunity to call in to the general store and have his clips de-rusted and his hat stitched. Then he headed off into the interior, zigzagging his way nor’east, nor’west, nor’east, nor’west, until he reached Segli. All this time he had been taking copious notes, and he was now ready to begin work on his map. He returned to Blimbing on a motorbike and holed up in a shack. Sustained by Rumanian beans and hooch, he worked for a further two years, using an enormous sheet of Waterbath paper and a collection of coloured pencils. A stupendously detailed description of the map appears in Crone’s Anthology Of Sumatran Maps Concocted By Felons (Hooting Yard Press, 1937), to which the reader is referred.

But that’s quite enough about maps for the time being. Of more interest is the fact that at around this time Buttercase fell in with a gang of ne’er-do-wells who haunted the more disgusting sinks of vice and iniquity in Blimbing and, when it was learned that he was an accomplished accordionist, he was invited to join their jazz band. The band was led by the scrofulous but benign cornettist Lip Suk Jab, a Korean who had been hounded out of his country following the infamous Unserrated Postage Stamp Scandal of 1922. Suk Jab’s musical gifts were slight, but what he lacked in technique he made up for with what can only be described as stage presence. Slightly less than five-feet tall and impossibly rotund, he held audiences in thrall. Several critics have attempted to explain precisely what it was about the man that was so spellbinding. Was it his occasional impersonations of Constantin Brancusi or Cicely Courtneidge? Was it the metal harness he strapped to his head which emitted incandescent light? Was it the pocketfuls of custard triangles with which he showered the audience at the end of each show? Who can say? What we do know is that, when his regular accordionist was drowned in a freak dandelion-hammering accident, he cajoled Buttercase into joining his band.

The next thirty years passed in a whirl. Cartography was all but forgotten as Suk Jab’s band – known variously as The Crumpled Ships, The Amnesiac Lane Octet, Lip Suk Jab And His Big Aluminium Kettle, Shimmying In Ponds, The Norwegian Hooters, or Go Wild With Lip Suk Jab And The Mullet Babies – toured endlessly through Sumatra, Java, Borneo, New Guinea, Timor, and the Yukon. There were shows virtually every night of the week, in hotels, dancehalls, casinos, scout-huts, community centres, bingo parlours, caves, factories, deserted mineshafts, and temples. Lacquered gits clutching recording contracts followed the band everywhere. Broadcasters from the burgeoning Dutch East Indies Radio Corporation were forever dragging the band into studios. Buttercase took up the bassoon and the ondes martenot in addition to his favoured accordion, although he was never able to play either of them with much conviction.

This idyll ended on 14th January 1959, when disaster struck. The band, billed as The Authentic Sound Of Geriatric Slobbering, were booked to play at the Fop Palace, a nightclub in Selwyn, hard by the banks of the Macmillan, which had become the in place to be for the local population of trappers, Mounties, card-sharps, detectives, rustlers, and circus performers. The journey from Borneo had been exhausting, and half the band had contracted dengue fever. Lip Suk Jab himself was under investigation by the Javan Secret Police following his involvement in a stamp collecting scam, and had become convinced – rightly – that agents pursued him at every step. Indeed, on the night in question, eleven Javan plainclothesmen were loitering in the snug bar at the Fop Palace, ready to make an arrest. As if this were not trouble enough, Buttercase’s accordion had been sabotaged by thugs employed by a rival Sumatran jazz combo; as soon as he played an F sharp, explosives secreted within the instrument would detonate, blasting the accordion, its player, and anyone and anything else within a five-hundred yard radius to smithereens.

By quarter to midnight, when the band were due to begin their set, the Palace was packed. The Javans, skilfully disguised as a group of Lithuanian business executives, had fanned out from the snug and taken up strategic positions around the stage and at the exits. Never one to tolerate sickness, Lip Suk Jab had summarily dismissed the dengue-stricken members of the group and was busy rehearsing four locals in a back room. None of the callow Yukon youths had ever played a musical instrument before, but so awe-inspiring was Suk Jab’s tuition that, by the time the lights went down, Biff, Skip, Chump, and Dib felt confident enough to attempt the banjo, tuba, sackbut, and kettledrums respectively. The locals gave them a rousing cheer, which was only slightly muted when they were followed on stage by Buttercase and the other two long-serving band members, whose names we may learn later. The seven of them started to bash out a scorching opener designed to set the scene for the arrival of their leader. You will be pleased to learn that Buttercase played the bassoon on this number. The deadly accordion rested behind him on a rather intriguing stool, carved entirely from the tusk of a narwhal and engraved with scenes of piracy and racketeering. He had received this piece of scrimshandy from a Bolton mustard merchant after a concert in Wetter in 1946.

Towards the end of the number, Lip Suk Jab made his way towards the stage. As he paused to screw the last bolt into his incandescent metal head-harness, four of the Javans pounced. Before he knew what had hit him, the cornettist was gagged, handcuffed, and frogmarched out by a side exit into the wintry Selwyn night. The rest of the Javan detectives joined them, and they hurried down to the banks of the Macmillan, which was of course entirely frozen over. Hastily lacing up their ice-skates, and muttering incomprehensible messages into their walkie-talkies, the agents careered across the river at breakneck speed, narrowly avoiding bashing Lip Suk Jab’s head into an ice-trapped tugboat in midstream. Once they had made it to the other side, they put the cornettist back on his feet and, having removed their skates, ordered him to march with them four miles to the airfield where their bi-plane was waiting. As they set off, midnight struck.

To be continued …

Part One is here : now read on …

The Paraffin Shed was the smallest of a cluster of buildings, far from the railway itself but owned nevertheless by the company, which charged pitiful rents to the tenants. Among the other buildings were a tavern, an ink factory, a menagerie, a cork shop, an igloo, a massive, empty prison, and a warehouse full of bones. The Paraffin Shed was rented by a retired sea-captain, whose name is unfortunately not recorded. In later years, Buttercase remembered him as by turns gruff and amiable, languid and crusty, corrosive and vibrant, insensible and bereft. Although it may be thought that he spent long hours entertaining his small visitor with seafaring yarns, tales of exploration and derring-do upon the high seas, rattling narratives of piracy and bilgewater, there is no evidence that he ever did so. As far as we know, all that ever took place was that, upon Buttercase’s arrival, the boy unhitched the tub from his back, unscrewed the stopper, the sea-captain poured a paltry amount of paraffin into it, demanded his money and held out his vast and hairy hand for receipt of the coins, whereupon the lad paid him, replaced the stopper, hitched the refilled tub on to his back, bid the old salt farewell until the morrow, and began the long trudge back towards his parents’ hut.

Did he ever visit any of the other buildings? He may have done. What would have happened had he encountered, in the warehouse of bones, a slobbering giant wracked with the dropsy? Or blundered into the menagerie and come face to face with a starving bison? Or been lured into the ink factory and had his tub of paraffin stolen from him by the snag-toothed serf detailed to stand guard at the door, his mouth forever filled with sticky, raspberry-flavoured confections, the juice of which dribbled down his chin and fell in droplets upon his outlandish pantaloons? What turn might have been taken in the life of the cartographer-to-be had these things happened? There is rich material here, but we must turn our backs upon it, and follow the young Buttercase back to the rep-divided hut, to which, daily, he returns, as twilight descends upon the land, and howls are heard far off in the distance, or perhaps the occasional spurt of gunfire, or a hoot from the rickety train, trundling on its way, with or without passengers, with or without freight.

He was sixteen years old when he was flung into prison, and twenty when he was released on a special licence, having been recommended by the prison governor to accompany an Antarctic expedition as general factotum, accordionist, and toothbrush maker. Up to the very minute the steamship Indescribable chugged out of the harbour, Buttercase was handcuffed to a prison guard. The two had become fast friends during the seven-week journey from the prison to the small seaside town from which the expedition sailed. Clump, the guard, was a small, flickering man who drew maps in his spare time. Never having set foot outside his homeland, his exquisitely illuminated maps of Far Cathay, Beach, Zimpagu, Hoon, and Yssicol were the products of a fevered imagination all too rare in men of his profession. Buttercase, of course, was awestruck. He repeatedly badgered Clump to make him a gift of one of his maps, but the prison guard refused for reasons we can only guess at. Not that we will bother.

As they made their way on foot across the country for forty-nine days of that abominable winter, Clump nevertheless gave Buttercase a far more valuable gift – a pencil. It must not be forgotten that in those days, convicted felons – especially those released on licence – were routinely deprived of pencils, as they were of pencil-sharpeners, pencil-cases, pens, protractors, rulers, compasses, crayons, set-squares, and many other items of stationery and graphic equipment. The king himself had renewed the ban in the very year of Buttercase’s release. Clump was taking a terrible risk. Perhaps he was in his cups when he hastily shoved the pencil into Buttercase’s pocket. The great cartographer later recalled that the prison guard had tears in his eyes as he did so.

On the deck of the Indescribable, Clump removed the handcuffs from his young charge’s puny wrist. The two embraced. Doughty explorers, some already kitted out in their Antarctic furs, bustled Clump off the ship; they were impatient for Buttercase to begin his accordion lessons. Prisoner and guard never saw each other again. Clump came to a bad end. On his return to the prison, he had his pencils counted, and his furious blushes confirmed the governor’s suspicions. Dismissed from the service, he fell on evil days, and died two years later, drunk out of his brain on the floor of a post office in Tantarabim.

To be continued …

[NOTE : Clump is the first, but by no means the last Hooting Yard character to meet his end drunk out of his brain on the floor of a post office. The same fate befalls a music critic in The Phlogiston Variations, I think, and quite possibly one or two others. This was also the first appearance in my work of that realm of mystery known as Tantarabim.]

And while we are on the subject of Hoon …

Splattered with seagull droppings, the Woman of Twigs stood at the very edge of the cliff, her back to the sea. Barefoot, she rocked gently back and forth on her impromptu podium. The villagers were gathered about her, wretched and snivelling. Some carried pitchforks, or dainty little tin boxes full of bip. They were all ears as they waited for the Woman of Twigs to speak. She had blindfolded herself with a threadbare bandage, bound her hair into tufts with flaxen yarn and roots, and held in her hands a ribbon of bloody silk. Precisely at the moment that the thousandth wave of the day crashed against the rocks below, the Woman of Twigs ceased her rocking, cast the ribbon to the winds, and, shouting to make herself heard over the screeching gulls, began:

“You asked me to save the village from Doom. I have communed with a variety of weird and tiresome shades to seek guidance. You are correct, your village is imperilled. There is only one way to rescue it from the coming agony. Three of your number must travel many miles distant, to the town of Hoon. There, they must find a churn, possibly broken, the churn of Hoon, which has had engraved upon it a rather fetching likeness of myself. Do not ask why. Having scoured Hoon for this churn, and found in Hoon this churn of Hoon, it must be brought back here, with due haste, and hurled into the boiling sea from this very spot on the cliff’s edge. That task complete, your village will once again know glee. I have left unmentioned one crucial point. The three who will venture to Hoon, there to find and return the Hoon-churn, must all be called Ned. That is all.”

Work began at once on building the chariot. In the kitchens, the villagers boiled up huge iron pans full of mud and silt dredged from the riverbed. Trees were felled in the spinney. The smithy at his anvil beat out a goodly number of nails, spikes, and very sharp hooks. Within a week, the foul-smelling but indestructible vehicle was ready. Volunteers fanned out across the countryside to trap a suitable beast of burden. Horses, oxen, even a crippled reindeer of great elegance, were sighted and stalked, but another week elapsed without success. Eventually it was decided that the three Neds would have to travel under their own steam, pulling the chariot by themselves. Ned, Ned and Ned agreed, drooling with excitement in their eagerness to set out on so glorious a journey, one that would save the village and bring them renown.

They left the village at a gallop, in the middle of the night. Without maps, they relied entirely on local lore and superstition. From infancy, each Ned had been imbued with a long catechism of saws and proverbs. Now, each had engraved upon his skull a different couplet, handed down through the generations:

If you wish to go to Hoon / Spit three times and follow the moon

Hoon’s beyond yon crumpled hedge / Hemmed around by gorse and sedge

When you see eight pebbles strewn / You’re eight days and nights from Hoon

They travelled without pause, two dragging the stinking chariot while the third lay bundled in it, sleeping or feeding from a polythene bag full of curdled slops. At first they followed the course of the Great Frightening River, until suddenly it wormed its way underground. For eighteen months they travelled through a desolate landscape, flat, grey, and curiously redolent of shurd. But as they entered Hoon’s hinterland, things changed. In rapid succession, they passed an asbestos works, a barrel of rainwater, a customs post, damp hectares, elk encampments, fenceposts, grotesque wooden carvings, horrifying shrubbery, improbable water tables, jerrybuilt huts, a kaolin quarry, lumps of disgust, monstrous gulches, nebulous stretches of pointed brambly things, ornithologists’ hideaways, parakeet enclosures, quarantine sheds, rusk markets, strange gobbets of sludge, a tremendous farmyard, urn burials, a vacuum, wrestling pythons, extravagant banks of yellow fog, yeast traffickers, and a zither-crushing factory. Ned said to Ned and Ned, “Soon we shall be in Hoon. I can feel it in my water.” He was not mistaken.

The great South Gate of Hoon was over a thousand years old, and completely overgrown by clumps of hideous, fleshy foliage oozing poisonous sap. All attempts to destroy this abominable vegetation had met with failure, and it had not been possible to open the gate for at least two centuries. Rather than blasting a hole in the town wall, a ramshackle lift contraption was knocked up close by. Two wooden platforms, one either side of the great wall, were raised and lowered by an exciting system of pistons, pulleys and winches operated by a team of gate-keepers wearing boa constrictor masks. In return for their labours, they exacted a hefty price; unfortunately the three Neds were utterly penniless. Muttering among themselves, our heroic trio decided to proffer gifts in lieu of payment. Ned offered the gate-keepers his cap, which was made of rusted whisks. Ned presented them with a sick toad he had been pampering for the past month. Ned gave them a handful of silt scraped from the underside of the chariot. Well pleased with these gifts, the gate-keepers allowed the exhausted threesome to clamber onto the platform.

Two days later, the three Neds were lowered to the ground on the other side of the wall. At last they were in Hoon! Finding the possibly broken churn of Hoon could only be a matter of time. They would be implacable, ferreting into every corner of the ancient town. As soon as they disembarked from the wooden platform, however, they were set upon by a whirling tangle of ruffians who bashed them senseless, stole the shirts off their backs, emptied their polythene bags of slops into the gutter, wholly dismantled the chariot, had at them with ferocious scimitars, and left them for dead. And indeed, Ned and Ned were dead. Ned was carted off by a passing stretcher patrol, but panted his last breath an hour later, by which time the ruffians had scampered away, heading for the mountains. They stopped by the kaolin quarry to eat their packed lunches, and then, as night came down, they strode up the mountainside, these ruffians, their gazes fixed on the sky above, to look at the numberless stars, to view the boundless firmament.

Ned! Ned! Prick up your ears, for you must listen out for the sound of clopping hooves! It is a sound that betokens the coming of the preacher man astride his horse. The horse has been shod with iron horseshoes by the fat florid farrier at the fearsome fiery forge. While he waited for his horse to be shod the preacher man stood by the horse trough in the market square, preaching. He preached of a sulphurous vision of times to come, and the villagers trembled. Then the farrier’s urchin came running to tell him his horse was duly shod, and the preacher man stalked off to the farrier and paid him for his labour and mounted his horse and came a-clopping along the high ridge, silhouetted against the darkening sky. As night fell, he dismounted from his horse and tied it with a halter to a sturdy tree trunk by a brook, and he unrolled upon the ground his sleeping bag, a secondhand sleeping bag that once had belonged to an Antarctic explorer. Then the preacher man dipped his tin cup into the brook and gave water to his horse, and dipped the tin cup again and drank it off, and then he made a fire using gathered sticks and kindling. The moon looked down upon him, and he looked up at the moon. He shook his fist at it, but shouted no imprecations, for he did not wish to cause his horse alarm. The horse was timid.

Ned is tucked up in a makeshift bed on the balcony. The stillness of the night is punctuated by the hacking of his cough. Ned is tubercular, hence the balcony. His parents had not the means to send him to a high and healthful Alpine sanitarium, but their simple home has a balcony, so that is where they put him. Out there, he will be the first to hear the clopping hooves of the preacher man’s horse, when at last he comes a-calling. In the fug of their parlour below stairs Ned’s parents huddle around their radio, listening to dance tunes by Xavier Cugat & His Orchestra, and to strange buzzes and whistles and hisses and hums and crackles which interrupt the broadcast now and then, as if some alien intelligence far away in the boundless firmament is trying to communicate with them. There is a fire in the grate, made with gathered sticks and kindling, and it crackles like the radio.

The preacher man tied a nosebag filled with feed to his horse, and then he squatted by the fire and plucked from the griddle balanced over it the sausages he had cooked for his supper. As he chewed, the stars twinkled in the black sky. He could not bear to look up at them. He stared instead into the fire, and saw imps and demons dancing, and souls in torment. The horse shuddered, and kicked the sturdy tree trunk, but weakly. The preacher man had rescued it from the knackers yard, paying a pittance to the knackerman. He had yet to give the horse a name. In a pocket of his preacher’s black suit, as black as the sky, he had a list of the names of racehorses. He would pick one, all in good time, for this horse, if it lived. Musing over the names of racehorses was sinful, but like all men, he was a sinner. There was gristle in his sausages.

In the bed upon the balcony, Ned, his ears pricked up to hear the clopping of hooves, should they come clopping, cannot stir. He is tied to the bed with bindings. His parents had listened to a radio programme in which Blötzmann propounded his views on the treatment of the tubercular. Several parts of it had been inaudible due to buzzes and whistles and hisses and hums and crackles, and they had pieced together afterwards what they understood. Balcony air, plenty of milk, and binding to the bed. Ned hears nothing but the racking of his cough and the howling of distant wolves. He stares up at the stars, and gives them names. In one of his pyjama pockets he has a list of the names of racehorses, a list he has committed to memory, and he passes his tubercular time allotting the names to the stars in the sky.

Morning came, and the preacher man kicked the embers of the fire and smeared his face with the ashes. Birds were twittering in the trees, and he cursed them. He had specific sets of curses for different types of birds, and he knew all their songs, he had learnt them long ago at his mother’s knee. He cursed his mother too. He pictured her in her cell at the lunatic asylum, perched on an Alpine slope. She would greet the morning with her own demented song. He was thankful he no longer had to hear it. The horse was still asleep. The preacher man pissed into the brook. He fought a craving to eat an eel for breakfast. He awoke his horse and mounted it and set it a-clopping with a kick.

As dawn comes, Ned falls asleep, bound to his balcony bed. Below, his parents tend to their cows and their poultry. They keep their eyes peeled for the postman. They are expecting a parcel.

Outshone by the sun, the stars were no longer visible, so the preacher man could gaze up at the heavens without fear. His horse clopped along, back on the high ridge, out of the valley.

Ned’s head is awash with dreams. He dreams of cows and poultry and racehorses, all horribly intermingled, cows with chicken heads and racehorses with beaks and feathers and chickens that snort like racehorses. Stars burst and explode, birds sing, and alien beings from far in the boundless firmament buzz and whistle and hiss and hum and crackle. And there comes a sound of the clopping of hooves, at first very quiet, as if from afar, but it grows louder and louder, closer and closer, and Ned wakes from his dreams, and still he hears the clopping of hooves, and he rises as far as he can from his makeshift bed and weakly he calls to his parents below, “Ma! Pa! I hear the clopping of hooves! The preacher man is come!” and the effort of calling makes him cough and cough, and he collapses back on the bed on the balcony, thin and frail and tubercular. But his parents do not hear him, for they have spotted the postman, in his little red van, chugging along the lonely road below, and they run down the hill to wave him to a halt.

Up on the bridge, the preacher man’s horse, exhausted, collapsed beneath him.

The birds fall silent. The radio crackles. Ned coughs.

There is no parcel from the postman today.

Does anyone remember the rhyme children used to sing, long long ago?

Wod & Pym, the choc ice men
Clattering towards the buffers
Their choc ices melt in the noonday sun
They’re such a pair of duffers!

That was the version I knew, which I sang lustily, with my tiny pals, as we skittered and scampered and made mischief in the bomb craters. I had absolutely no idea what we were singing about, and I had forgotten the song itself, until, the other day, I heard it on the radio. I was listening to a play. It was dull and foolish and badly acted, and beset by awful hissing and feedback, which may or may not have been deliberate. I would have switched the radio off had I had the chops to rise from my pallet of straw and cross the barn to do so, but I had a splint on my leg and a bandaged head and no sense of purpose. So I just lay there listening, in the small hours of the morning, before the crows began to caw, before the milkman started on his rounds.

There was a scene in the play, set, as far as I could gather, in the dystopian ruins of a bombed city, where the protagonists, a milkman and his floozie, were having a terrible row about crows. Exhausted by shouting, they both fell silent, and then, as from a distance, I heard the song, chanted by children somewhere in the rubble. It faded, there was hissing, and the pair started arguing again.

It would be nice to be able to say that hearing the song again after all these years brought memories of childhood flooding back, but it didn’t, not really. It did make me sit up on my pallet of straw, as best as I was able. Alert, I scribbled the words on the back of a cornflake packet. I might never sing again, if my childish caterwauling could have been called singing, but I felt a great sense of urgency to know more about Wod and Pym. Who were they? Why were they clattering towards buffers? Did their choc ices really melt in the noonday sun? Had they ever really existed? I suppose I thought that if I could find answers to those questions I could learn something, too, about my own life, about my past, about the trajectory that had taken me from the bomb craters of a ruined city to this barn, through the roof of which the rain came in, when it was raining, where my only visitor was the milkman on his morning rounds, where the only sounds were the cawing of crows and radio broadcasts, where time passed slowly, and there were no clocks.

When the milkman came that morning I pressed the torn scrap of cornflake packet into his hand, and pleaded with him to find out everything he could about the rhyme. He said he was a busy milkman, but that once a fortnight the mobile library parked on a patch of ground hard by the dairy, and he would try his best to help me. I told him he was a saint. He said he must be getting on, as he had much milk to deliver. I asked him to turn off the radio as he left. They were playing music now, Xavier Cugat or some such, and I could not bear it. Outside, the crows were cawing.

They say there was once a grisly murder in this barn. I have seen no ghosts. There is an ethereal albino hen that haunts my dreams, with its terrible eggs, but I do not think that counts.

The milkman was as good as his word. I do not know how many days passed before he came bearing a few pages torn out of a reference book, for I did not keep a tally. He gave me the pages, and a bottle of milk, and asked me if I wanted the radio turned on before he left. Again I compared him to a saint, and he blushed. One does not often see a milkman blush. I told him I was done with radio broadcasts, and that he could take the radio set away with him, and if he did not want it for himself then to drop it into a pond. He thanked me and unplugged it and left. He did not say what he would do with it. I listened out for a splash, but the rain was dripping through the roof, relentlessly, and the bandages around my ears would have muffled any other sound.

What I learned from the pages torn from the reference book by the milkman was that Wod and Pym were, indeed, true historical characters, from the previous century. They were a pair of chancers, continually thinking up money-making schemes, schemes invariably doomed to failure, sometimes leading to spells of imprisonment, sometimes leading to riot in small shabby townships. They made and sold decoy ducks, pin cushions, alarm bells. They planned but did not realise a crocus plantation. They hawked taffy. And with the coming of the railways, they devised their travelling choc ice shop. The idea was to be constantly mobile, aboard a locomotive, selling choc ices to hot and eager tinies at each railway station they stopped at. But neither Wod nor Pym gave a thought to refrigeration, and the train they commandeered crossed desert and prairie, not realms of ice and snow. This was the flaw that sunk their scheme, and for which they were ridiculed by the tinies gathered at hot sun-bashed stations along the line.

Hence the song I had sung in my very different childhood, when it was cold, when the wind howling through the ruins chilled my bones, when I sucked icicles and shivered in the porch of the ruined dancehall, wherein those adults who had not yet fled the city danced to the sounds of Xavier Cugat & His Orchestra, piped through a Tannoy, loud as bombs.