10. Autograph Albums

aka Pompous Verbal Gems

As I remarked in a previous yarn, sooner or later most people have a go at keeping a diary. The same applies, in a rather lesser degree, to an autograph album. I still have mine but I'm afraid that apart from the usual banal entries as:

"By hook or by crook

I'll be last in this book"

Auntie Nell

written on the last page, and:

"For better or worst

I'm sure to be first"

Dad 

 

written on to top of the first page, there are no world famous entries like:

"To Ed from his friend, Johnny Weissmuller".

 

The Walter Mitty in all of us makes most kids try to get the signatures of those they can see in themselves, and Tarzan was the hero of hordes of young fellows at who the Charles Atlas adverts were aimed, me and my mates included. We knew that we would never get a body like his, but we admired somebody who had. Even to the extent of dashing about the fields by the Welsh Harp*,

Pottinger

Weissmuller

dressed in the briefest of loin cloths, or in the nuddy if we felt like it, and attempting to swing on the branches of trees, there being a shortage of thick jungle vines at the Welsh Harp. We also discovered how Tarzan made his famous call. You try leaping about trees with nowt on, them snags catch you in some very dodgy places. 

The best imitation of Tarzan yodel I heard was when my mate Sam swung on a rotten branch which broke, and dropped him astride a quickthorn hedge beneath. His backside was the best advert for shredded wheat you could wish to see, and for weeks he walked about like Cheetah than Tarzan.

However, to come back to the album, no names which are a legend of their lifetime adorn it's pages. After all, who else but me, ever heard of Kipper Jonto, who wrote the verse about the young lad from Ealing on the middle page the filthy swine. I had to glue it to the page facing it in case my old man saw it. Or if Wicker Dean, so called, not because he had sticky fingers, but because the only trousers he ever had to wear were a pair of knickerbockers his old man discarded when he got the sack from the stable he worked at for a while. He was the author of the engaging poem on page two, which ran:

 "What a lovely little fish

The Sole is,

What lovely little fish

Are soles."

and so on for several lines, in the same vein.

My albums can be likened to a graveyard, full of names unknown to everyone, except the people who put them there. But there is one entry which in its 'profundity' could match any of the statements of Chairman Mao. It reads:

"Il ne fait rien remettre au lendemain"

and for all of you unfortunates who never got beyond 'La plume de ma tante' it means in English, as she is spoke:

 

"Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today"

It was written by one of our French teachers, who rejoiced in the nickname of Puncher Lac, owing to his habit of belting the inattentive on top of the bonce with a full bunch of fives, and I was very proud of what I considered to be a literary rose flourishing in the dungheap of banalities and lavatory graffiti that filled the rest of the album.

Some time later I realized he didn't intend that I should look at it every so often in later life, and resolve to be more industrious and enterprising than nature made me, but was knocking me about not doing the French homework he kept dishing out, and never got - anyway, not on time.

The average person has a few of these deep sayings tucked away in the back of his mind, and trots one out every so often when he wants to sound intelligent, and his cronies nod their little old nuts, and say "True, that's true", while all the time, at the back of their mind, they're thinking, "Bighead". And these old saws are quoted at you when they suit the quotee's requirements. I worked with a chap who was fond of saying , "Many hands make light work" when he wanted a digout, but when asked to give a hand, always said, "Too many cooks spoil the broth".

My old retired chippy, who lived next door, used to pass away the time by watching me work, whenever I did anything in the garden. Being a short-arse, he had to stand on a stool to look over the fence and was continually clicking his tongue and saying "Don't spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar", whenever I took a short cut to finish a job. One day I was fixing the roof of the dog kennel, I was making for our cat, who was on the big side, by banging in some nails, and this superannuated coffin maker was shaking his old grey loaf and muttering about doing the job properly with screws and the hoary old boat and tar cliché. When I said why didn't he come round and do it, he promptly got off his perch and came round. And do you know what he did? He brought a handful of screws, which he proceeded to slam in with an Irish screwdriver - a bloody great hammer. Still, the laugh was on him cos when he went back and clambered up on his stool again, it collapsed, and he fell on a tomato plant by the fence and broke it. When I looked over to see if he was alright, I noticed the leg of the stool, which had broken, had been fixed before. S'right, with a screw through the seat. No doubt by the old do the job properly and don't spoil the ship method.

But then we all come out with these corny sayings, which are fit only for autograph albums and Xmas crackers. Not long ago, when I had been giving my son a driving lesson and had been ranting on about keeping at thirty in built up areas, he said, "How come you always do fifty then?" Before I knew it I replied, "Don't do as I do, do as I tell you".

It just happens to suit the occasion, as all these pompous verbal gems do, and the dirty look I got for saying it, was all I deserved. 

* Note:  for The Welsh Harp see

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Reservoir

















9. The Chicken And The Eggs

aka The Egg And I

One of the funniest books I have read is Betty Macdonald's "The Egg and I". This is a true story of her life as a newly wedded young wife, suddenly uprooted from the warmth and security of a large family, living in a busy town and dumped on a derelict farm in the mountains of a remote North West state of America, where she and her husband settled down to raise chickens.

Her narrative of life among these feathered idiots is hilarious, and her opinions of the chicken certainly coincide with my own, as I too, when a young married man, kept a flock in our back garden. This was partly to provide nourishment for my family, food rationing being in force, but mainly to satisfy that urge to be self sufficient which is in the make up of most of us. I too, found that the idyllic vision of gathering fresh warm eggs from the nest boxes while the busy clucking hens pecked in the clean sweet- smelling litter for corn, at my feet, was only the gift wrapping around a long period of hard work and frustration from day old chicks to seven month old layers. The day olds, which we kept in a box in the airing cupboard with a hundred watt bulb for warmth, vied with each other to see who could crap the fastest in the nice clean food put down for them. No matter how warm and free from draught you kept them, when they decided to die, they'd stand and droop and die, helped on their way by the other fluffy members of the Mafia who trod all over each other in their eagerness to peck the eyes out of suicide sister, and hasten another 3/6d down the drain. We felt that they knew how much we paid for them and were determined to double their value, as half of them always died off, not from any known ailment but through sheer bloody mindedness. And as for mess, the only creatures equal to the chicken when it comes to converting the Garden of Eden into an overflowing sewerage are the hippo and the duck. If you've seen the hippo pool in any zoo and Mr. Hippo cruising about with his gaping maw, shovelling in everything that's floating, then you'll know what I mean, and Donald Duck, aided by his family, will turn any garden into a morass that would make Verdun look like the Chelsea flower show, if let loose in it for more than a day.

I once conned my brother into helping me clean out the chicken house, and as we shovelled and scraped the soggy, smelly layer of droppings from under the perches and off the house floor, he paused from filling his bucket, straightened his back, looked disdainfully at the dripping shovel and said, "I bet these birds hate your guts, it takes them all week to lay this nice comfortable layer of tom-tit, and you come along rake it all up and shove down a load of straw and disinfectant and make 'em start all over again". I said, "All week ? you must be joking, I cleaned 'em all out three days ago". "Three days", looking disbelievingly at the heap of manure, "I thought they were supposed to lay eggs, they don't have much time for that, do they ?". I assured him that they did indeed lay eggs but I presumed they didn't know when as something was always going on behind, as apart from all this food recycling effort, the randy old cockerel who ran with them, was forever trying to better his previous days' conquests and while they did lay their eggs in the nest boxes, they probably thought that they were a kind of indoor toilet created especially for constipation days.

We went into breakfast and for some peculiar reason, brother seemed to have lost his appetite after all that hard graft in the fresh air and turned down a lovely plate of eggs and bacon for a couple of slices of dry toast. He always had a delicate stomach, right from childhood.

The chicken can bring out the basic instincts of the nicest folk quicker than any other of God's creatures, great and small. I was horribly alarmed one day when I heard my wife shouting and screaming in the garden. What I saw and heard on dashing outside, shook me rigid. There was this delicate young Goddess, at whose feet I worshipped, this gentle and innocent creature who had to have the mildest of jokes explained to her over and over again because she didn't know the meaning of the swear words, chasing the cockerel round the garden, taking terrific swipes at him with a lump of wood, and calling him words I didn't think she'd heard.

David, me & Nanny and, err, not a chicken.  Best I could do. Sorry. c1975. 



When he'd finally taken refuge up a tree and she'd thrown the timber after him, I said "What's all that about?". "I just fed him and went to pick an egg out of the nest box, and he rushed in and pecked a bloody great lump out of my hand" she fumed, "just you get out there tonight and wring that sod's neck" and stomped indoors for elastoplast and aspirin. See what I mean about chickens ? Not only had he shattered some of the beautiful illusions I treasured, but looked like destroying the great big he-man image that I fondly hoped I presented to my wife, as I was now committed to wringing his damn neck and I'd never done that before. What's more, I was dead Chicken about doing it (what a terrible pun !). So, with nightfall, after making supper last for two hours, and mustering my rapidly shrinking courage, with an effort that made my throat feel like it had swallowed half a yard of sandy ballast, said "Well, better nip out and kill the cockerel for tomorrow's dinner", in a voice several times higher than normal, and strode out looking like a cave man off to supply a dinosaur for lunch. I think I had an idea that I could wring his neck while he was asleep, as I eased the door open quietly and carefully shone the torch along the perch and met the flare of his eyes looking straight at me. He must have known I hadn't come to tuck him in comfortably for the night, as he came off that perch like a rocket with a screech that made me drop the torch and slam the door hard as I could, and then lean against it while my stomach slowly descended from my neck back to it's normal position. His enraged squawks gradually died and when I picked up the torch, I saw he wasn't hollering in anger, but agony as he'd caught his stupid neck between the door and the jamb and had choked to death. I mentally crossed hit-man off my list of talents, tied his legs together and hung him in the shed for plucking in the morning. 

Going back into the house with the nonchalant manner of the trained poultry slaughterer I answered my wife's unspoken question with "No bother, he won't peck you no more", and retired to the kitchen for a cup of tea and a fag. 

Still, one ought not to make out that you are what you ain't, as the whole thing rebounded on me, cos, great big fearless he-man image now re-established in the eyes of Goddess on a pinnacle, made her tell everyone who kept chickens up our road, that I'd kill their birds off at Christmas as I could do it alright, no trouble at all. And I had to as none of the blokes fancied doing it either, and jumped at the chance to get it done for a packet of fags. 

Often wondered if she heard the cup rattling on the saucer when I drank that tea, cos I couldn't stop my hand shaking. Shouldn't think so, but as I said, that chicken does bring out the basic instincts in the nicest folk.