23. The Oomy Goolie Bird

You've all heard of the legendary Oomy Goolie bird* who flew backwards, not, as popular belief would have it, to keep the dust out of it's eyes, but because it was not interested in where it was going. It just wanted to see where it had been

This attitude towards life applies, with equal intensity, to a lot of us humans who are fascinated by the past.

The American tourist, who ain't got much history behind him, is probably the most afflicted person in the world with the Oomy Goolie outlook. Not that you can blame him, after all, if all your historical heroes wore six-guns and were buried up Boot Hill you'd be interested in a bit of past culture.

Anyway, this pre-occupation in what's gone before has led to a new sport. Graveyard Jogging or the Cemetery Stroll.

I am an enthusiastic Tombstone Trotter and there's nowt that keeps me more physically fit or mentally alert than an hour or two around the parish church allotments. Mainly they're on the side of a hill which keeps the muscles active and deciphering the inscriptions on the older stones keeps the brain alive.

Memorial inscriptions are naturally and generally of  religious trend but now and then appears the humour which is part of the human jig-saw. Or a descriptive piece telling exactly how the person concerned died. 

A good example of this is in the Salem Baptist Church graveyard at Speen, a small village in Bucks. Its read simply - "John Cartney, who was killed falling from his cart. 1838."

So what? I hear you mutter to each other.

Well this plain statement immediately takes you back in time to a quieter age, away from the horror of a six lane pile up, the motor-way maniac's disregard of adverse conditions, the utter frustration of being caught in a seven-mile tail-back from some road works. You're back in the days of horse drawn traffic, stacks of manure for the garden, time to breathe and the only traffic on the road is the horse and cart in front of you sedately clip-clopping home after a hard day's work in the fields. 

Thoughts of Gray's Elegy** spring to the mind, "The ploughman homeward plods his weary way" etc, and you are refreshed in mind and body. 

Then what happens? The bloke in front falls off his cart and kills himself. Or the horse treads on him and kills him.

You're back to square one and wish you hadn't read his flipping inscription.

There's a similar type of inscription in the grounds of St Mary's, the parish church of Harrow. This tells of the RAILWAY TRAIN and the dire consequences of getting in the way of it. The bloke*** who suffered these certainly had nothing to do with the inscription but somebody wanted the world to know and had it put on stone in detail. Possibly with the view of stopping the RAILWAY TRAIN from coming through Harrow as this happened in the days before Metro-land.

Some inscriptions are unintentionally funny in their mis-statements as are these two:

"Here lies the body of Thomas Vernon

Only surviving son of Admiral Vernon"

and

"Underneath this sod lies John Round

Who was lost at sea and never found"

Others are deliberately funny. Here's a couple from Cheltenham. The first, dated 1825, reads:

"Here lies John Higgs

A famous man for killing pigs

For killing pigs was his delight

Both morning, afternoon and night

Both heats and colds he did endure

Which no physician could ere cure

His knife is laid, his work is done

I hope to heaven his soul is gone"

Source:  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178703/Japanese-tourists-flock-Cheltenham-grave-obscure-C19th-pig-killer-John-Higgs.html

The second, dated 1769, is about a blacksmith:

"My sledge and hammer lies declined

My bellows pipe has lost it's wind

My forge is extinct, my fire's decayed

And in the dust my vice is laid

My coal is spent, my iron is gone

My nails are drove, my work is done"

Source: https://www.francisfrith.com/blog/the-village-blacksmith

There's a good inscription on a stone at Bromsgrove, Worcs, for a chap named Knott. A good pun is always good reading:

"Here lies a man who was Knott born

His father was Knott before him

He lived Knott, and did Knott die

Yet underneath this stone he doth lie

Knott christened, Knott begot

And here he lives and yet was Knott"

No matter where you go you'll come across the Knockers. Here's one about a miser buried in Dorchester Abbey:

"Here lies one who for medicine would not

Give a little gold, so his life was lost

I fancy that he'd wish to live again

Did he but know how much his funeral cost"

And another about a woman buried in Bideford churchyard:

"Here lies the body of Mary Sexton

Who pleased many a man but never vexed one

Not like the woman who lies under the next stone"

Nasty!

There must be thousands of pert inscriptions around the country so join the army of graveyard joggers and give free reign to your Oomy Goolie outlook. Investigate the past and enjoy the humour of these long dead poets.

I shall be very happy to print any authentic inscriptions that any of you have seen. Send 'em in to the Editor and I'll devote a page to them under the heading of Tombstone Trotters Gazette or Oomy Goolie Investigations. 

Signing off with the most famed of all inscriptions:

"Under this sod lies another"

Notes:

* I've no idea where the flying backward reference actually comes from, but there was a joke about the Oomagoolie bird, so named as it had very short legs, and every time it landed it squawked........

** 'Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard' by Thomas Gray 1750/1. 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard

*** I must have stopped and read this inscription every time we walked through St Mary's churchyard. It's the tombstone of  Thomas Port, 1805-1838. For the full gory details, see the attached:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Harrow_rail_accident

I remember being interested in another stone, I think, round the back of the church with a skull & crossbones or similar, but, at 30-plus years distance, I can't recall, or find, anything else about it. Then there was the occasion when the famous Peachey tomb (see the links below) was nowhere to be found.....like properly actually disappeared. 

https://darkestlondon.com/tag/harrow-on-the-hill/
https://harrowonline.org/2016/09/28/the-story-behind-john-peacheys-tomb/

We carry on the Tombstone Trotting tradition. It was intriguing to find the tomb (a not-so-tasteful 9ft pyramid) for the very-much-still-alive Nicolas Cage, in New Orleans' St Louis No. 1 cemetery, when we visited in 2017.  And the Animals Cemetery in Jersey, where we went summer 2018, has any number of moving epithets.

  

22. Being Thrifty

There's a vast difference between being thrifty and being mean yet the dividing line is as fine as the one between genius and imbecility. Sometimes it's hard to say what type a person is. In the eyes of some he's a financial wizard who knows how to look after his money, whereas to others he is as tight as a fishes arse, which is well renowned for being water tight.

Same as a bloke who is well endowed when it comes to I.Q. If he's a mite eccentric in his outlook he's considered unconventional to some, but to others he's due for a basket-weaving course. It's hard to be sure, depends how things turn out.

One of the lads who was a member of the Pembroke Boxing and Athletic club, as I was during the thirties, came under the genius or nutter category. We all thought he was barmy. Full stop.

After all, why belong to a boxing club and never get a pair of gloves on and have a bash in the ring ? Why go out on a training run to get fit then half-way round catch a bus back to the club ? Must have been George Raft. Incidents as the night when he turned all the tables and chairs upside-down because he was fed up with seeing the same old set-up and drank his cuppa while balancing on his head to prove that the law of gravity was a fake as the tea went upwards to his stomach, all confirmed our opinion that he was as bent as a four pound note.

But as I said, it all depends how things turn out. In his case we were wrong as after the war he became one of boxing's best known managers of pro. fighters. All the loot he earned from it stemmed from his association with idiots like us who only got cups and medals for our bent hooters and corrugated ears. No names mentioned but I'll tell anyone who cares to ask.

Scrooge was a novice compared with a chap I worked with just after the war. He was a Czech who managed to escape to England before the Nazi invasion and after demob chose to live here with his wife, an English girl he married during the war. His first name was Karl.

Don't get me wrong when I say that Ebenezer S. would have benefited fron a few lessons from him. Whereas E.S. was rich and his frugality was self imposed, Karl had nowt but a few sticks of furniture, a pair of overalls, his demob suit and a bit in the bank. Well more or less.

And an ambition to own a restaurant. Whereby sprang his Spartan way of life in an effort to save money.

I must say that saving anything out of the wages our guv'nor paid was bloody nigh an impossibility.

If Eamonn Andrews* had been doing "This is Your Life" in 1946 and picked on our boss, he'd have read him the Xmas Carol with the exception of Scrooge's change of heart which our guv never got round to having. He retired to a tax haven abroad before they'd been invented.

Anyway Karl made the effort with a determination that was amazing in it's adherance to living on a minimum of outlay.

He'd bring to work one fag, one match and the side of a matchbox. This he'd smoke after dinner which consisted of a cheese butty and a long thin bottle of a pale brown liquid which we assumed to be home-made wine. It was his method of drinking it which led us to this conclusion as he'd take a mouthful, swill it round his teeth, gargle in his throat, then swallow. Only when he left it on the bench one day to go and have a Jimmy and one of the lads took a quick swig, did we find out what it was.

Cold tea, without sugar or milk.

I never saw him eat or drink anything else the whole time he worked there. He never bought a raffle ticket, had a beer with the lads, backed a horse, played a game of brag on paydays or paid for a haircut. His missus cut it. So we, having only the ambition to exist as best we could classed him as a mean sod who wouldn't give you a cold if he had the flu.

And tried innumerable ways to make him part with some cash but all to no avail until one day we found his Achilles heel.  A nosh up of chicken.

He let on that he loved chicken cooked any way. Roast, boiled, fried, grilled, devilled, supreme, curried, diable, with fruit sauce, pimento, apricot stuffed, in casserole, you name it and he positively drooled. But finances being as they were he couldn't afford it.

It so happened that I, at that period of time, kept chickens in my garden, and here was an ideal chance to score over big spender. I told him that I had a bird which was a poor layer and I'd sell it to him for four bob. Dirt cheap.

This was the truth slightly bent to suit the occasion as it was indeed a poor layer having died two days before from internal egg laying and I had buried it in the garden. Which made it dirt cheap. Well for four bob it was.

Karl jumped at the offer and I dug it up that night, cleaned it up and gave it to him next day. Luckily we'd been having a dry spell so it wasn't too bad. Just a mite dusty.

The lads killed themselves laughing when they heard how Karl's taste buds had overcome his avarice and even more so when those same taste buds made him refuse to pay me four bob as he said it had a peculiar taste and it was only worth two shillings. I was a bit relieved that he hadn't got food poisoning so settled for that.

I never saw or heard of him after he left but I'll bet he got his restaurant and I only hope that I never stray in there for a meal. Knowing what blokes are I'd bet my shirt that somebody told him what I did and God alone knows what I'd get served up if I ordered chicken supreme.


Notes:
This entry was written/published in late 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamonn_Andrews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Your_Life_(UK_TV_series)