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.
The Willys Jeep
I am grateful for many things and I've just discovered one that I'd never thought of before: my surname is not Willys.
Whether or not John Willys (1873-1935) liked his family name I don’t know. It doesn’t matter; the Willys Jeep appeared in 1941 and was a blessing to military units anywhere and everywhere.
Find the steepest hard-baked field you can, have it scattered with crevasses and just go. The Jeep could carry a quarter-ton over this sort of terrain with ease. Of course, things could go wrong. Not many, but when something as reliable as a Jeep goes wrong it does take you by surprise.
I was in India, between jobs and making myself useful as Driver.
‘Get this lot over to Armoury,’ said the Flight Sergeant, pointing to a stack of crates. ‘Take the Jeep.’
And so I met the Jeep. It was 1944. The terrain from Transport to Armoury was virtual wasteland. Well-baked wasteland. I loaded, got in, checked the feel of the gears and clutch, found the ignition, started up and went. It was great. I got the feel of it and I began to like it. My bottom and the seat parted company frequently.
And then it happened.
I felt the gas pedal leave the sole of my shoe and drop to the floor. We leaped forwards, engine screaming at full revs. I glanced down. The pedal was just lying there.
Now, you’re thinking,‘Why didn’t you just switch off, you idiot.’ But that isn’t what I was thinking. No. I am a straightforward thinker in these matters and, to me, the obvious solution was to lift the pedal and keep my toe under it. While looking ahead, I felt around for the pedal. I could feel it but I couldn’t get my fingers under it. It was flush with the metal floor.
By the time I had thought of the ignition we were quite a long way past the Armoury. I braked, we stopped. I got out, shaking, and walked back to the workshop.
A heavily-sweating Armorer was carrying an M2 Browning gun over to a bench.
I had my speech ready but as I opened my mouth it struck me that I couldn't say it. It was too silly. After all, to say ‘There’s something for you in that Jeep over there on the horizon - and can I please have a lift back to Transport?’ is just not on.
But don’t ask me what I did say because I’ve forgotten.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010
The Sun
I have always been keen on skies. Dawn, sunrise, storm, sunsets - anything but the flat grey panoply that’s only good for portraits.
Of all of them, sunset and sunrise are the most universally attractive to the person with a camera. But they’re also far from easy to shoot. Because of the speed with which they develop and disappear you need to be a good sprinter if you’re any distance away from the right spot to shoot from. And a good pair of lungs, a sound heart and the mental serenity of a Cistercian monk.
(And, listen: do beware of the sun. I'm convinced that it's got a grudge of some sort against all photographers. Give it half a chance and it'll do the wrong thing.)
Last week’s slight unwell-ness included an interesting change in the pulse rate and a tendency for the room to start circling round me. It reminded me of one late afternoon in Greece when the photographer asked if I would be kind enough to carry his tripods while he ran ahead up to the top of the hill from which he was about to shoot a stunning sunset. By the time I reached him he would have found the right spot.
I started up the narrow track. It was dried mud, formed by thousands of years of rain torrents and goats. The next minutes of pounding from mud gully to grassy clump at roughly the angle of your average house roof was tiring. I don’t remember much of the climb except feeling my heart coming into my throat with a sort of salty taste and knowing that death was imminent. But I do remember reaching the final rock ledge, heaving the canvas bag of tripods towards him and seeing him run at me.
He got the picture, and at dinner that night he said my red face rising slowly above the surface of the flat rock had reminded him of the picture of a Mexican sunrise he had once shot for the National Geographic.
Ever been to the Taj Mahal? Taken snaps of it? And from which side of it, the East side or the West? I think it more likely that it was from the East side. If the sun was setting it was setting behind that magnificent central dome. Right?
So to shoot the rising rather than the setting sun you will have worked out that you have to go round to the West side.
One photographer did just that for me. I was not with him. When he flew back he came to see me and show me the results.
I was stunned to see the pictures.
‘It wasn’t easy, Paul,’ he said.
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘In what way?’
‘In the way that, in order to get the sun behind the central dome, the only possible spot to stand was, um, not very pleasant.’
‘No?
‘No. I had to stand knee-high in sewage.’
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010