Short Story
In the mid-1950s I was newly-married. We had just arrived at our new house and I was starting to battle with the novel experience of creating a garden.
It had been a paddock, with much of the original cobbled stone yard still visible above the soil. All of this, of course, had to be routed out before any thought of planting began.
Slogging with pickaxe and spade on my first free Saturday afternoon I heard a slight cough and mellow Surrey voice behind me.
‘Er - g'd afternoon!’ The voice sounded tentative, as though afraid to intrude. I looked round. The paddock had a very desirable old redbrick wall running along one edge and above this had appeared a man in shirtsleeves and battered hat. He was holding out a basket piled with apples. He was obviously our neighbour’s gardener.
'Oh! Good afternoon!' I wiped my brow. I was glad of the break.
‘Like some apples?’ he said.
‘Well, thanks very much,’ I replied, and added, ‘Very kind of you. I suppose it’s OK with your boss?’
He regarded me kindly. ‘Oh, yes, he said. ‘I am the boss.’
He was not the gardener. He was our neighbour.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
I plan to end this blog in November. If anyone has any suggestions about material for a further series, please do email me. (Click on CONTACT, home page.) I should be more than pleased to consider them.
The Squirt
I detested him. He was five years younger than me. When you’re twelve, all younger boys are squirts.
My parents and his were close friends and during the occasional visit by one family to the other I was expected to play with him. Actually play with him. A complete squirt. I could barely look at him.
It was our turn to visit them. On the half-hour Green Line bus journey to Streatham I would plan ways of avoiding him.
We arrived, and he began. He raced out to their garden yelling for me to follow him because he wanted to show me something. It turned out to be his new trike. He got on it and pedalled furiously round and round the lawn, making silly faces and sillier noises. He then jumped off and began being an aeroplane and when he tired of that he started doing his head-over-heels routine. I expect I just stood there, caught between the Scylla of boring adults and the Charybdis of this undersize monster. I followed my usual tactic of being as unpleasant as the situation permitted.
The invitation was for the usual high tea. During the meal his voice was practically continuous and his helpings of cake and jelly and blancmange were masticated loudly as he tried to tell jokes while eating.
After tea he begged me to go up to his room to play with his electric train set. I trailed after him and probably made uh-huh noises as he showed me what it would do. After this he said he knew a practical joke and would I help him. It turned out to be a case of me going downstairs again and waiting outside the front door while he lowered black thread for me to attach to the door-knocker and go upstairs again. From his window he then made the brass knocker do its thing. Eventually the door was opened, closed again and his father called wearily from the hallway not to do that again, please.
The time came to leave. They walked to the bus stop with us.
The boy danced all the way, running round and poking me. At the bus stop he did his aeroplane act until the bus arrived. As it drew up the adults made their farewells.
But the boy did something extraordinary. He leaped up at me, wrapped his legs round my waist, pushed his mouth very hard against mine until our teeth clashed and gave me one long, wet kiss.
On the bus I sat in a state of shock, revulsion, fury, bewilderment and disbelief. It lasted for weeks.
The next time we met was some forty years later over lunch in a Guildford restaurant. Cruelly, I reminded him of the event. He raised an eyebrow, smiled wanly and said he had no recollection of it.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
How to catch a pigeon
For me, when the earth was young and I was a brand new technical copywriter, life still retained some of the schoolboy spirit. Many will tell you it still does. Rubbish. I’m a very sober hymnwriter.
The other young copywriters around me were of the same mind as me and late Friday afternoons were seen as the legitimate time to loosen ties and have fun.
One of them, a lovely man who knew how to build amplifiers - and did so for me once - came out of the darkroom next to the office carrying a stuffed pigeon. It was a prop for some recent publication that had not yet been taken back to the studios.
‘How about,’ he said, ‘sticking this up on that pipe?’ He pointed up at the hefty bit of pipework that ran along one wall, close to the ceiling. ‘And then ringing Maintenance and saying we just noticed it and we can’t get hold of it. Then just sit back and watch the fun. Yes?’
Five minutes later we sat looking in awe at the smallest and most athletic one climb onto a small table and up onto a chair just small enough to stand on the table. Slowly he attached the bird with tape and adjusted it to a most lifelike attitude. He then found he couldn’t summon the courage to climb down again but, with some help, he did.
The instigator rang Maintenance. ‘We’ve just noticed - up on the ceiling - on a pipe, there’s a pigeon. Can you do something?’ They said they’d be round in a few minutes.
Two of them turned up, preceded by one end of a ladder. The younger of the two, a mere boy, appeared to be an apprentice. The older one, heavily moustached, looked up at the pigeon and rubbed his chin.
‘Ah, yes,’ he murmured to the boy. ‘We’ve had a lot of this sort of thing.’ Very slowly they positioned the ladder against the pipe and a couple of feet from the bird.
‘You hold the ladder. Now, see, we do it like this.’ He went on, half whispering, ‘We go very, very slowly like this so that. . .’ and he began gingerly to climb, his voice fading as he concentrated on the target, getting closer and starting move his left arm outwards.
We sat with hands clamped over mouths and not daring to catch anyone’s eye. He stopped, and his left arm moved closer and closer to the bird. Then he pounced.
For how long he stood there gazing at the cold lump of feathers in his clasp I don’t know. Eventually, he turned and looked down at us and gave us his opinion.
‘It’s stuffed!’ he said.
Fortunately, the boy produced such an explosive snort of laughter that it smothered our own and we began expressing to each other our disbelief at the lengths some people will go to for a laugh.