This story was written as a response to a challenge on the WordBohemia web site.

http://wordbohemia.co.uk/            or             https://www.facebook.com/groups/wordbohemia/

The challenge was a photo of clouds.....


Clouds

Here in the desert in Western Australia we don’t get many clouds and even less rain, so when the clouds showed up in a pinky sort of turquoise sky, everyone stopped for a good look at them. They were the grey, puffy sort with the flat bottoms. The sort you could imagine scudding across the sky above the African plains before the rains of the wet season started.

                ‘You won’t get any rain out of them,’ I averred.

                ‘No,’ agreed Bruce, ‘and, if you did, it wouldn’t rain cats and dogs here in Cue, more like scorpions and flies.’

                ‘With maybe some dust thrown in.’

                ‘Yup, there’s always dust.’ said Bruce as we joined the queue in Cue.

*

There was only Mrs Brown and the vicar from St Martin’ sin front of me so it shouldn’t take long to get what I wanted. I could have them without gift wrapping, that would save a bit of time as I didn’t want to be late for the match at the snooker club.

                I tried not to listen to what they asked for, it was none of my business but what would a vicar be wanting at this time of night and why hadn’t he gone straight to the event horizon anyway instead of here at the five corner shop?

                ‘I’ll just take a sermon please Mr Patel,’ said the vicar irritably. I think he was a little cross with himself, which he wore on a silver chain, bouncing against his chest, with his belly shelfing enough to catch it if the chain broke and choked the monkey.

                ‘Mounted, reverend?’ asked the shop keeper.

                ‘Always, we don’t want to hide our lamp under a bushel do we?’

                ‘Err, whatever you say, that will be thirty five beatitudes please.’

                ‘Bless you my son,’

                ‘But I haven’t sneezed yet.’

                ‘Well, just keep it in your bushel until you need it then. Thank you, good night Mr Patel.’

The vicar stomped off up the hill to deliver his sermon on horseback.

*

                ‘Hello Mrs Brown, we haven’t seen you around here for a while have we? I hope you haven’t been disloyal and doing your shopping at Nouns-R-Us or up at that new gerunds place?’

                ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t do that, it’s just that I haven’t been too good lately so I’ve been making do with adverbs, just treating myself to the odd coincidence on Sundays.’

                ‘Only teasing Mrs Brown, what can I get you this evening?’

                ‘I’d like two wins and a coincidence please.’

                ‘Any special medium you prefer?’

                ‘No, it doesn’t have to be a medium, I don’t really do paranormal, just standard is fine.’

                ‘OK, I’ll just drop a little telepathy in the brown paper bag then, OK?’

                ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have said that, it’s really not necessary.’

                ‘I know, but I enjoy telekinesis, BBC2 mainly’

                ‘And what’s wrong with Emmerdale then?’

                ‘Well it’s not Corrie is it and it never has that nice prof Brian Cox in it.’

                ‘That’s because he’s a physicist.’

                ‘Could still leave BBC2 now and then couldn’t he, even if he is a necromancer. There’s no art blacker than Emmerdale to my mind.’

                ‘OK then, I’ll arrange it for you, but it will cost extra you know, plus VAT.’

                ‘That’s fine, just take it out of my paradocs’

                ‘OK, ’Night Mrs Brown.’

                ‘’Night Mr Patel, see you next week.’

*

It was now my turn but, before I had a chance to step up to the plate, a saucer landed just in front of me and demanded the cup that he had just one so where was it? Mr Patel had to admit that he had swatted it, thinking it was a fly. It was not one of the main characters in the story, just an extra…terrestrial. I knew then that I would have to charge him with cuppable homicide.

                Swatting flies soon becomes a habit with anyone who lives here in Cue. The town makes its living from exporting flies and dust by rail to Meekatharra and then on to Perth. You can’t see the flies because of the dust of course. The gold mines closed at the end of the war. A few men work at the Crosslands iron ore mine to the west. So iron or flies and dust just provide a living for this forgotten town of 328 people.

                ‘G’Day Bruce’ I said to Mr Patel as I arrested him.

                ‘Don’t you want to get your shopping done before you arrest me?’ he asked – always the salesman.

                ‘Ok, I’ll take an infundibulum then, I don’t want to be late for the barbie do I?’

                ‘D’ya want the chronosynclastic or the antediluvian model?’

                ‘I’ll take the chronos, don’t try and fob me off with one of those old models that don’t work during the Wet. Can you deliver it to the snooker hall for me?’

                ‘No worries, mate,’ said Mr Patel as he struggled with his sled dog.

                ‘Wooof,’ coughed the husky, who was feeling a little horse, as he lit a cigarette.

                ‘Could you throw in a paradox please, I don’t think Occam is on duty tonight?’

                ‘OK, mate, that’ll be twenty seven dollars but, of course, it will all be free.’

Excellent service I thought, right on cue.

                I looked out the door to see if Mrs Brown’s coincidence had turned up yet. She had. ‘How nice to see you Mrs Brown,’ said Lydia. ‘I havent seen you for years. I didn’t know you lived here, you were the last person I expected to meet. How is your daughter doing, I believe she went off to Perth to marry that nice miner? How long ago was that…?’

*

I walked up main street after dropping Bruce off at the sheriff’s office to be charged, he was getting a little dim. The snooker hall was on the left and the barbie was just being lit in the fire pit.

                That was my cue from the infundibulum, which had clearly done its job well, to join the queue to use the only available cue in Cue to take my shot before setting off down the pit to the barber queue for a burger, a cold tinnie and a short back and sides in the latest fashion.

END

Cue house lights and curtain.

               

This story was written as a response to a challenge on the WordBohemia web site.

http://wordbohemia.co.uk/            or             https://www.facebook.com/groups/wordbohemia/

The challenge was a photo of a station clock above a platform.....



The station

The station lies with its back to the river, wedged in between the buildings and roads. Sphinx-like it sprawls across the concrete desert as its blackened glass roof winks and glints in the morning sun. One end has many infibulating rails lines emerging, crossing and changing as they route the trains out to their different destinations. The other end terminates in a cliff of red brick. Behind this cliff the offices of the railway managers hide. ‘ This train terminates here,’ comes the voice from the loudspeaker system, what else would it do? Join the managers in their plush offices for a drink of tea or posh coffee in the senior manager’s rooms? Why is this move called a terminus? Do Penzantian people think of Paddington as their London  terminus, or terminator?

Why is a station called that when it is all about moving to another place? Stationary is the opposite to moving so why not call it a move to give a better idea of what it does?

Encyclopedia Ricardia

Move – n. A place for passengers to board and leave trains.

                I will call it ‘move’ throughout this story. The man pushes the broom along the platform of the move. It is early morning, the diesels stand waiting, their haze of blue power panting up through the morning sunlight to the soot- stained glass panels of the roof. It is the opposite to a cathedral, they have stained glass in the walls with a dark roof. The move is a temple to travel. The roof is supported on pillars, they are in compression so they must be made of cast iron – I think back to the metallurgy classes all those years ago. The crossing, horizontal tie rods are in tension, so they must be steel. Abraham Darby would have recognised the structures as he designed and made his Iron Bridge.

                The broom glides more easily across platforms 1 and 2. They have had the makeover, upgraded to a surface of French limestone.  It is Rocheret Jaune, an Early Cretaceous limestone that comes from Belley, near Lyon. Beautiful sections through fossil shells, especially high-spired gastropods, can be seen in places by looking down at the floor, not where you are going. Fossil watching in the Mouvre.

                I look at the panting beast of the diesel, crouched, waiting to unleash its power to speed the train through Old Oak Common then on to Penzance. I think back to the days of steam when a trip on a train always started with a walk to the engine to stand in awe looking at the Merchant Navy, West Country or Schools type of beast. Less power than a diesel, less efficient, dirtier but altogether better. Diesels have no soul, they don’t talk to you with the same language or have the BO of warm, escaping steam.

                The Penzance train is leaving Bristol. The driver, official title, motorman, checks around his darkened cab. Dials on the dash have a muted gleam, he leans on the dead man’s handle, notches up the throttle, checks the speed. Looks out the windscreen at the reds and greens of the signals. Heading to Reading, up to full speed insoulated from the outside, cosy in his cab – motorman’s trance setting in. Shakes himself awake, cannot sleep on this job – he is responsible for more than four hundred lives. 
             

A clatter of shutters opening from WH Smith – the news concession on the concourse. A bored woman starts heaving in the bound lumps of newsprint holding the ephemera of the day – so Kyleigh has a new hair style – so what.

                A submarine noses out of the door of the sandwich shop, they have found that cooking bacon and leaving the door open doubles sales of food and who doesn’t have a cup of coffee with their bacon sandwich. Manipulative huh? You betcha, everyone in the move is on the make!

                The derelicts cautiously raise their White Lightning hungover  heads from the seats at the edge of the concourse, the transport police having taken pity on them over this cold night and not moving them on until the morning commuter flood tide starts to rise.

                The first in train of the day edges cautiously in to its daytime home, the red terminating buffers reaching out their welcoming arms. It stops, doors open and the human cargo spills out, the first off running down the platform – to get to work early? Bankers, plonkers, graphic designers, girls in short skirts hurrying to their appointment with their computer screen, boys wearing their first suit, tie in pocket for later dressing. Across the concourse, down the steps, on to the waiting underground – no way to live, to earn a living. The train sits there, job done, all doors swinging open. The driver steps out of his cab with his airline pilot’s bag and walks along the platform to the back, now front of the train.He gets ready for the trip out to commuterland for the next load of human detritus. The train adjusts its psychology for the change in direction
.

                The sun gets brighter, glinting off the rails that go from these buffers in an unbroken line to Penzance, stretched and welded to their optimum equivalent expansion of 21 degrees Celcius – no fishplate joints now with their hypnotic rhythm.  Rails of steel, a compromise between soft toughness for strength and hard brittleness for minimal wear. How many sleepers between here and Penzance? A good question for a pub quiz.

                Ten minutes before lift off, the barriers open, the concourse people hurry through, clutching their tickets – some without, hoping to sneak through. The train has been cleaned, fuelled, maintained, washed – all overnight. Now it is ready, whistle, green flag, the clock ticks, it moves! All twelve coaches accelerate in a terrible symmetry, heading for Cornwall, grockles on the way to Penwith.

                Jed is sipping his third cup of coffee, he has been waiting for three hours, eager to meet the overnighter from far-off Penzance, eager to meet his love, eager to start the rest of his life, eager to start their life together.

                Chloé only left him three days ago, just enough time to visit ’ her-now-ex’ in Penzance to tell him, finally, that she will not be back. She has left him, she has found Jed, Jed has found Chloé, they have found each other, they will be together for ever – they are sure.

                He tries her number again, again no answer, is she asleep on the train, the ‘fone on silent?

                He finishes the coffee, tosses the paper, ‘this coffee may be hot’ tautological cup into the nearest empty bin, he transfers the bouquet to his coffee hand and checks the clock again. It hangs suspended from the roof. A cube with six faces, only four have clock faces. He reduces it step by step - cube, square, line, dot, nothing, he oxidises it to a tesseract – what is next? A tesseract has fourteen faces, an expensive clock for one more dimension. He has checked the Chloe train is on time, twenty three minutes to go, he finds it hard to cope now that the clock has slowed down. Another coffee – no, he is already jittery from the anticipation of seeing Chloé and the caffeine. The seconds tick by, the hands on the clock crawl to the train-in time.

                The Penzance train arrives – all the way from the cornubian granite of Cornwall.

                It tiptoes to the buffers and then stops and relaxes with a sigh. The doors open, the Kernow people debark and look around. Where is Chloé? Jed strains to look – there is a Chloé sized gap on the platform. He waits, no Chloé. He calls, no Chloé. He waits for another hour, no Chloé.

                He checks the date, 14^th February, no Chloé.

                He trudges home from the move, no Chloé

    He lives his life, without Chloé.

Noah's Ark

Noah’s Ark

He was an experienced Navel Arkitect and had been designing and building Arks for many years since he qualified at Southampton University. For reasons associated with his family and work pressures, he kept an office just off Lambeth High Street in London although he often had to travel to ship building yards around the world – frequently China and Korea where the ships were built these days to keep his client’s costs down.

      He had been working on Arks and container ships over the last few years. He subbed out the ore carriers and other bulkers to his contacts as he built up his specialist skills. His most unusual job had been about ten years ago when he had been commissioned by an agent to design and build a wooden ship to carry a breeding pair of all the animals on the Earth and enough of their special feed to keep them going for a period of forty days and nights. He never did find out who the client was as it started to rain and then kept on raining during the build and animal collection and he only just managed to complete the job before the whole Earth flooded. He gave the job the code of Mark One Ark or MArk1 for short. As there was a bit of a shortage of trees in Lambeth, he subbed out the actual building work to a company called Gilgamesh plc in Middle Potamia. It went quite well except that he had to work in the new, to him, units of length called cubits – not to be confused with the computing term of Q bit.

      He headed out of he office for lunch today at his favourite pub, The Old Bull and Bush, a few yards down Lambeth High Street. As he walked down the road, he was surprised to hear and see fire engines rushing down the High Street in the same direction as himself. As he neared the pub, he saw a plume of smoke rising from the beer garden. He asked one of the many bystanders what was going on.

      ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

      ‘It seems that the barbecue in the beer garden got tipped over and it set light to the original bush that the pub is named after – no Old Bull,’ said the bystander.

      ‘That’s a shame as all the sound equipment for the outdoor disco was hung from that bush wasn’t it?’ he queried.

      ‘Yes, but you seem to know all about it, how’s that then?

      ‘I’ve done some work in the past for their children’s play area and I’ve been a customer for many years,’ confirmed Archie. ‘I’ll go in and see what needs to be done.’

      ‘You be careful then mate, them barbecues can be dangerous,’ warned the bystander.

      ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got my Hi Vis jacket in my rucksack.’

By the time Archie got through the health and safety cordon into the garden, the bush was only smouldering, so not really burning but the landlord was testing the audio system to see if it was still working. He asked if Archie would stand there and listen while he went inside to test the microphone.

      ‘Would you stand here and listen while I go inside and test the microphone?, asked the landlord. It was not a problem for Archie.

      ‘No problem,’ said Archie.

Archie expected the landlord’s voice to come out of the burning bush but a voice he didn’t recognise said, ‘Is that Archibald Noah there or Archie Pelago?’

      ‘Err, yes, I am Archie Noah’ said Archie, ‘although I don’t normally use the bald bit as it is obvious that I am losing my hair and I don’t like drawing attention to it. I don’t normally talk to bushes in a pub garden anyway as it will get me a strange reputation.’

      ‘Well you should stop using the hair from your armpit for a comb-over then, it’s too obvious in this wind.  I was your client for the last Arken project and now I have a another project for you. Apart from a few issues, I was quite impressed with the last Ark you designed, I thought it was a real Ark de Triomphe. Well, that is excusing the fact that you forgot to carry out the risk assessment about having carnivores and herbivores on the same deck; I will never forgive the lions for eating the last unicorns. I’d like another Ark, but bigger this time than that one. I want it to have fifteen stories instead of three.’

Archie thought that fifteen stories would be impossible and too big for all the animals anyway.

      ‘But I have locked all my cubits away and, anyway fifteen stories is impossible. That would be too much room for all the animals’ protested Archie.

      ‘Not only do I want fifteen stories but I want all those decks to be filled with fish. And not only do I want no animals and all fish but I want there to be a specific type of fish. I want them all to be carp.’

      ‘The MArk2 to have fifteen stories and all to be full of carp? That is ridiculous!’ protested Archie.

      ‘You are a righteous man and I am the lord thy god so you will bend to my will,’ thundered the bush.

      ‘Well, you are the Man,. I suppose, but who is this Bill who is in charge and why do you want all this anyway? Is there another flood coming guv?

      ‘No, it’s because I can, I am omnipotent after all. I have always wanted a multi story car park.’ 

The Seven Ages of Man

The seven ages of man

The age of infant

The child was born when the child was young, but the world was old. It had existed for billions of years without that child – or that tribe – or that species – or life itself.

            The child was born into the teeming billions of the world, a blank slate to be written as anyone, with just the basic Bios to get it started into existence before being influenced by everything and everyone surrounding it.

            Would it live to grow into adulthood, outlive childish diseases?

            Would it be a subsistance farmer, just managing to scratch a living from the poor soil of the available fields?

            Would it be a wealthy industrial leader with material riches to command, enjoy and waste?

            Why the difference?

*

The age of boyhood

The boy is waiting for his birthday, looking forward into the unknown future of his age of man, not knowing in which land it lies with its infinite branching possibilities.

             He does not know that his future is fixed, just waiting for him to follow that one critical path.

            He does not know that the arrow of time does not move. It is a pointer to show when he is and time flows around him to coalesce behind to form his passed times and add pages to the history book of his life.

            He is unsure about everything. He knows nothing, but he knows that he knows everything.

            How can it be otherwise in a teenaging boy?

*

The age of education

The boy leaves home. He leaves his family’s supervision and safety as he joins a University and indulges in manly things. He gets drunk, stoned, catches unknowable diseases but goes home as a child for free food, washing and sleep.

            He learns enough of the course to get by. He learns enough of life to grow up, hidden from his parents.

            He thinks he understands life and rails through the drunken nights with his peers against the unfairness. He grows up some more.

            He learns to compete, he learns that the world does not care if he is there or not.

            Now he is grown, enough to accept the inevitable unfairness of the world. He turns to the matters of a man and accepts responsibility for himself.

*

The age of family and work

The man leaves education, finds work, auctions his strength of body or mind to the highest bidder. He learns his trade, labourer or lawyer, both the same – different bushels of corn for different work. He gains experience, struggles and competes, spends his money on the family that he has gathered around him.

            His children grow, needing him each day, competition between work and family. One day they need him not, leave home; but still need money, and so it goes, the circle of life.

            Children distant, nest too big, time for a bungalow? ‘No stairs.’

*

The age of maturity

His age is but a twentieth of a millennium, the mountain is four million times older, a Variscan G G G G...Great Grandfather.

             He clawed his way up the foothills of the corporate mountain range until he reached the sunlit uplands of calm acceptance, no more promotion, just the casual fending off of upstart youngsters who would dislodge him from his upland summer pasture.

            He waits for his pension, happy not to strive but to graze efficiently with minimum effort until he leaves the threshing floor at the five of each day to return to his dependable family.

            Now he can pass on his knowledge and experience, but no one wants it. They all need to learn for themselves, no short cuts.

*

The age of age

The man is old, but not old as the mountain knows old, the mountain that he can see with his one good, though rheumy eye.

            He is on his own, but content. He looks to the many years behind

            His back is bent in a way that only a wind resisting tree knows and his skin is barked like that same tree, events of the many years embossed on the lignin.

            His walking stick is cut from that very oak; unfair as he does not care to prop up the supplicating sapling that bows before the lazy wind.

            Is there enough wood grown yet to form his coffin so that he can lie restfully, peacefully in the scarlet satin lining?

*

The age of rebirth

Life leaves the man, his corporeal skeleton is boxed  and fed back into the Earth to be chemicalised into minerals, metamorphosed and subducted into the mantle.

            The life of the man is but a tiny, unseen ripple in the fabric of the universe.         

            After many billions of years, the Earth is engulfed in the heat of  the super nova Sun. Man has long escaped to new systems. The materials that were the man stay behind.

            The following inevitable, gravity – driven accretion will see him reborn as part of the star dust that forms a new system.

            The universe continues; indifferent, wheeling, expanding.

            It knows nothing of the man, an atom is an atom, to be used to build new worlds, no matter whence it came, from peasant,  rich man, granite or mud.


This piece has been published in WordBohemia.
www.WordBohemia .co.uk

'If you build it, they will come.'

If you build it, they will come.

‘Sit down, please Sophie, it’s not going home time yet,’ said Miss Adams.

I looked at the big clock above the alphabet board and tried to work out how long I had to wait. I didn’t want to wait because I had something very important to ask my Granddad.

      I looked at the clock again. It didn’t seem to have moved since I last looked. Why was it going so slowly? A day in school is sooo long.

      ‘Why are you so fidgety today?’ asked my best friend, Anita who was sitting next to me at the paint table.

      ‘My Granddad’s collecting me from school today and I have something very important to ask him.’

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘I don’t want to say, it’s a secret.’

      ‘Oh, but surely you can tell…/

      ‘Anita and Sophie, will you two please stop talking and get on with your painting.’

      ‘Yes, Miss,’ we chorused.

*

‘Right, it’s nearly going home time, so can we please tidy up. Put the paints away and peg up your paintings so that they will be dry when you come to school tomorrow,’ called out Miss Adams.

      I hurried to get our table cleared and everything put away. Anita laughed at me, ‘you aren’t usually in such a hurry. It must be something very important you want to ask your Granddad.’

      I like it when Mummy is working and Granddad collects me from school. We walk home through the woods and he tells me about all the animals, birds and flowers we see. He says he likes it too as the walk is good for his room attics. He laughs when I say he doesn’t have any attics in his house. When we get to his house, Grandma gives me a drink and sometimes a piece of cake if she has been baking. Then we sit at the kitchen table and tell each other what we have been doing that day.

      ‘Yes, it is. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, Anita’ I said as I pulled my coat off my peg and tried to put it on quickly. We lined up, ready to leave, I was nearly at the front of the line.

      Miss Adams opened the gate and said, ‘goodbye, see you tomorrow children.’

      ‘Goodbye Miss Adams,’ we answered and galloped up the slope to where the parents, grandparents and childminders were waiting for us. I saw my Granddad and started to run towards him, ready to jump up into his arms so he would catch me and give me a hug but then I remembered that I was getting old now so I slowed down and walked across to him and put my hand in his big scratchy one and said, ‘hello Gandad.’

      He laughed and bent down to give me a kiss and a hug, ‘are you getting too old for a hug now, my little one?’

      I squirmed out of his arms and said, ‘I’m a big school girl now Gandad.’

      ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but you’ll always be my little one.’ He has always called me that. Mummy and Daddy call me Sophie but Granddad says he has that special name for me. I like that.

      ‘Gandad,’

      ‘Yes, my little one.’

      ‘Can I ask you a question?’

      ‘’Course you can.’

      ‘We only have a little garden at home but you have a big one so could we dig a pond in your garden?’

      ‘Where did this idea come from?’

      ‘We’ve been learning about all the creatures that live in ponds in nature study in school.’

      ‘We’ll have to ask Grandma but if she says yes, then we can.’

I jumped up and gave him a hug. This time, I didn’t care who was watching. ‘Oh thank you Gandad.’

      ‘OK, but don’t forget we have to see if Grandma says yes first, my little one.’

Mummy says I can wrap Granddad around my little finger. I don’t see how that is possible, so I don’t what she means.

*

The construction was going well. Granddad had marked out two overlapping circles on the lawn with a piece of string tied to a dibber to make a figure of eight shape. Daddy and Granddad had skimmed off the turf and dug out the holes, one was shallow and the other was deep for the fish to shelter in during the winter when water would freeze at the surface.

      ‘What are you going to do with all the earth you have dug out Gandad?’

      ‘I’m going to dig a new hole to put it in of course, my little one’ he said. Granddad is silly sometimes. You would have to put the earth you dig out of the new hole somewhere, wouldn’t you?

Each of the holes had a shelf around so that we could pots on them with water plants in. The next Saturday Daddy took me to a garden centre where we got a big piece of rubber to put in the holes to hold the water. The we filled the pond up with water from Granddad’s hose. It took a long time. It was still filling when Daddy took me home.

*

Granddad collected me from school again the next day, even though Mummy wasn’t working, because I wanted to see all the creatures in the new pond. I was very disappointed as there were no creatures, it was just full of clear water, like a swimming pool.

      ‘Where are all the creatures Granddad, I can’t see any?’

      ‘This is a good time to learn patience, my little one. There won’t be many creatures until next spring and then it will start to fill up.’

      ‘Oh, ok. I’ll just have to wait then. But where will they come from?’ I believed my Granddad because he always tells me the truth.

      ‘I don’t know but what I do know is that we have built it so they will come.’

Slated

Slated

The morning winter sun shone, watery, through the small panes of glass in the South - facing gable ended window, of the ancient classroom. I sat the furthest away from the window, hidden towards the back, in a dark corner, a sharp turn left as you came in the door, so that I was out of the first sight of any visitors to the room. Too my right was a row of shelves, painted the same dark red as the desks and almost as chipped. They were mostly empty of books; waiting for the future age of plenty, plenty of books, plenty of paper and the emergence of the plastic culture of plenty of everything including plenty of rubbish, famous as the effluent society. This was the time of real austerity where each pupil’s jotter had to be filled on each line and on each page. Complete with a signature from the form teacher to say that he was happy that it was full before you were allowed the nerve wracking trip along the echoing hallway of parquet flooring to the Head Teacher’s office for a new one. Miss Cates was always kind to the pupils but the mere fact of having to talk to another teacher – with an office, with a door that had to be knocked on - was enough to make us all nervous of getting the procedure correct.

I was sitting at a two-child desk with John Rogers. He was not really my best friend, Jack Lewry was that, but we had been separated for talking too much, Mr C Geen, our teacher,  had swapped me with Brian Hooper. Even back then I changed his name in my head to Mr Sea Green and thought of him as a sailor, even though he had been in the Army – the start of the strange brain thinking to come? He lived in the village in a bungalow with a name that always baffled me, Dulce Domum. It was many years later that I found out that it meant Sweet Home. Apparently he was something of a Latin scholar. The desk was all-of-one-piece. The framework was dark red painted angle iron with years of scratches from impatient shoes with steel ‘blakeys’ hammered in  toe and heel to make them last longer. The seat, for two, was a wooden bench. The top had two, sloping, wooden lids which we could, and did, slam down at the end of the class with many satisfying bangs in spite of Mr Green’s entreaties of ‘Pack up quietly please.’ Fingers were often caught in the bangs – revenge for imagined slights during the day. Our meagre stock of books was stored in the desk, under the noisy lids, ready for the next day. Homework was still in the future.

On the top of the desk, forward of the lids, were two ink wells that were topped up by the duty ink monitors from what looked like a small watering can. There were, of course, many ‘accidents’ during the day when ink would be mysteriously splattered across someone’s work or, even worse, a dress or shirt. We were each issued with a small square of blotting paper at the start of each school day. Between the ink wells were grooves in the wood where the pens were put down. As you may imagine, the wood in these grooves was soaked with the ink of years. The pens that lay in these grooves were wooden with steel nibs. They were only used for ‘best work’ as the nibs were in short supply and were constantly crossing over as the favourite trick was to press down too hard as we all tried hard to write with these devilish contraptions. When the tips crossed over, the pens would jam in the paper, tear a hole and leave a large blot as evidence. It took much persuading of the teacher to get a new nib as they were in short supply, many a nib was carefully bent back into almost working order. Most of us preferred the pencils we used in the jotters although there was always a queue to use the one sharpener for the class.

It was hard to write at all during this time of year as the classroom was always cold which made for stiff fingers. There was still coal rationing and the railways had priority over heating. When it was really cold, Mr Green used to get out the Valor paraffin heater and dispatch two of the biggest, strongest, boys to the hardware shop to fill the gallon tin can with Blue or Pink paraffin, paid for from his own pocket. The bonus with this was that we got an extra hot drink as a kettle was heated on top of the stove. We all looked forward to that hot cup of ‘billy tea’ mid morning when the kettle boiled.

      There were rumours of it for weeks but the day finally came. Sweets were off ration! All it took to make yourself very sick after eating too many sweets now was lots of money – and that was the parent’s problem wasn’t it? Now, instead of walking into a shop and asking, ‘What have you got for two stamps?’ you could march in and ask for what you wanted, the only limit was how much money you had managed to blag from your Mum, one penny or sometimes, even two.

      Today we were to have a session on  history. This turned out to be a discussion about the bad old days where your teacher told you how much better you had it than he did when he was at school.

      We sat there, half listening and almost believed it as Mr Green described the slates that each child had. It was about the size of today’s A4 with a wooden frame around it. You drew on it with a steel stylus but wo betide you if you pressed too hard because it would be difficult to rub out. All the writing and arithmetic was done on this. No paper was used except for the exams when paper, ink and pens were counted out and then counted back in. We knew what the desks were like because we were sitting on them. The school was the same. Most of the teachers were now ex Forces from the war but they would never tell us their stories.

      Mr Green then told us that the worst punishment that an unruly child could expect was to have their slate confiscated for a certain length of time. Without their slate they could  do nothing.  They were ‘slated.’

Leaving Home

Leaving Home

It was time.

      The babies had been hatched many months before. The feeding had been exhausting for the parents. They had been flying further away from the nest and it had been a bad year for the remaining small mammals that seemed to get better able to evade their clear-eyed stoops from high level as the year wore on. Their two children had grown with all the feeding. They were hungry with their mouths always open when the parents returned from their foreys away from the eyrie with their mobile larder of dead bodies - or fresh meat, depending on your point  of view. They started by looking like skinny chickens, ready for the oven, but gradually their feathers started to grow and as they did, the young birds grew to be the same size as their parents.

      It was unusual for there to be two youngsters at this stage. Normally the stronger and larger of the two would tip the smaller one out of the nest, to fall to its death on the ground below or to be be spiked on the waiting branches of the Douglas Fir. Less competition, one less mouth to share the available food with. Survival of the strong.

      The two young ones enjoyed their new feathers. They flapped their wings, took short exploratory hops around the nest. Tried to see if their wings would take their weight and transfer it to the waiting air but neither of them would take the ultimate, no way back, step of jumping off the nest.

      The adult birds circled high above the nest in the clear air, taking advantage of the rising thermals generated by the sun heating up the bare rock walls of the nearbye quarry. They called to each other; it was as if they were discussing their children’s future. They seemed to come to a joint decision, dropped a wingtip and circled down to their eyrie. The male eagle perched on a branch above the nest while the mother landed next to her children who, aparently sensing something was different, stopped their pleading for food  and closed their beaks.

      They all waited. The decision had been made. Today was the day, only the time was not known. The sun  shone, air rose in the tested thermals. The mother hopped across to the first chick and talked to it, persuavely, but nothing. The nearly fully fledged chick jumped up to the parapet of the nest. The mother called again – last minute instructions. Then the chick did the irrevocable, it jumped off, onto the waiting air. It dropped clumsily, spread its wings, waggled its tails and folded its feet under it.

      It was flying.

      It dropped twenty feet and felt the difference in pressure under its wings, felt the air rush past its staring, unseeing eyes, felt the pressures around its steering tail and found a thermal. It rose effortlessly, soaring with the warm air, the pressure lessened. It rose past the nest and screamed with ecstatic delight at its mother and sister. It was flying. This what it was born for. It experimented with the wing tips feathers, making and destroying the vortices, swooping, plunging and rising.

      It circled around the nest, called its sister to join  it. She did.  They soared and flew together. The greatest day of their life.

      They grew tired and hungry. It was time to return to the nest, to accept the congatulations of their parents and to gorge on some food to assuage the ravenous hunger they had built up with their aerobatics. They would be nurtured and fed for the last time today.        

      Tomorrow they would be taught how to hunt, they would go hungry until they learned how to catch their own prey. Once they could fly and hunt their parents would throw them out of the nest to make their own way in the world. A new generation.

      They were ready to leave home.