TOUCHED BY THE SUN
Touched by the sun, it was,
that smile upon your face,
honed by radiant sunbeams
from some other special place...
touched by some magic,
the light within your eyes,
glistening with beauty
when beauty never dies...
breathed on by the ages
your honest loving lips,
the truth inside you beating -
and it never, ever slips...
it's love, of course, my angel
in the grandest scheme of things
but it sometimes seems you've sprouted
a set of angel wings....
© Peter Rogerson 20.02.12
A PITGLOOM MURDER
Chapter Two
Gerald “Sandy” Bumbly-Smythe told everyone that he'd had an illustrious military career and recounted extravagant yarns as to the campaigns he'd been involved in, usually as brave and valiant leader. His accounts had been treated with more than a modicum of scepticism since one night, in “The Garter's Arms” (the village pub and the only substantial building not on the main road but tucked behind it via the gift of a cul-de-sac next to the church), he had tried to explain his part in the charge of the Light Brigade. It was then obvious to one and all that he was both a romancer and a poor historian, and from that time on sniggers had followed him just about everywhere he went.
He appeared to treat the contempt piled onto his shoulders with little more than mild impatience and the odd click of his tongue, and went about his business as normally as any ex-military gentleman would be expected to. So on the very same May day and at the very same time as Mrs Amy Garrett had made her way to the shop on her mobility scooter, he strode (with a pronounced limp from a wound picked up, he explained, at the Dardanelles during his military career) to the same venue with his head in the air and a snigger not so far behind him.
The moment he strode manfully into the shop he started huffing and puffing, head still held high so that all he could see was above his own shoulder-height, and requested half an ounce of his favourite shag of the air in the neighbourhood of the Myrtle twin behind the counter before he noticed the other twin in a puddle of congealing red matter on the floor and old Amy Garrett staring at it in horror.
“What in the name of Goodness have you done?” he barked at Amy, who was quite obviously too flabbergasted to reply. “What has this good lady done to you, may I ask?” he queried querulously of the prone Myrtle twin.
“Me? A tin opener … that's what … a tin opener...” stammered Amy Garrett, all a-tremble and suddenly uncharacteristically pale.
“It's nothing...” murmured the vertical Myrtle twin, and the big letter”C” on her cardigan announced to one and all that she was the variety of twin that had been christened, by doting parents above half a century earlier, as Conscience.
“Nothing!” barked “Sandy” Bumbly-Smythe “How can you say nothing!” he thundered. “Murder has been committed by this old hag here,” and he poked Amy Garrett in the ribs much too viciously for her good.
“Ouch!” she squawked. “You bastard!”
“Get the law!” ordered Bumbly-Smythe. “Get Officer Cavendish! This is a matter for him! Let him sort it out!”
“He poked me...” moaned Amy. “I'll withhold conjugal rights...”
“We don't have...” began Sandy Bumbly-Smythe, but stopped when Conscience sniggered.
“I remember back in the Crimea the things that would have been done to a woman who sniggered at an officer...” he almost exploded. “They would not have liked it, I can tell you that much! And as for talk of conjugal rights, what would Paddy have made of that?” He didn't go on to elaborate as to who Paddy might have been.
“There's been no murder,” grinned Conscience, ignoring his anger, “though there might be if you carry on like that, you great oaf!”
He ignored the “oaf” bit for the moment and glowered at her. “If there's been no murder what's this body doing on the floor all covered in rich red blood..?”
“Tomato ketchup,” almost laughed Conscience. “It's okay, Amelia, you can get up now!”
The red-soaked figure on the floor stirred, rose onto its knees like some nightmare from a horror film, and finally stood up, the blood or tomato ketchup or whatever it was dripping from her onto the wooden boards of the shop floor.
“How was that, Conscience?” she asked.
“First class, sis! You convinced these good people, and that's saying something!”
“You mean … this has all been a blasted charade!” roared “Sandy Bumbly-Smythe. “This has all been an outrageous confidence trick!”
“What's it been for, deary?” asked Amy, regaining some of her composure and privately thinking it was too heart-stopping a trick for the twins to have played on a neighbour as close to the pearly gates as she obviously was, at ninety.
“The Post Office in Brumpton was robbed yesterday...” began Amelia.
“And we thought...” continued Conscience.
“That we ought to rehearse...” said Amelia.
“In case it happens here,” concluded Conscience.
“So you lay on the floor and poured ketchup all over yourself?” barked Sandy.
“In case we get robbed,” nodded Amelia. “There are some terribly bad people around, you know, and two ladies running a shop have to be careful, you know.”
“I've a suggestion,” put in Amy Garrett.
“And what is that, dear?” queried Conscience, frowning.
“That next time you want to scare us half to death you use real blood!” she snapped. “Now I've forgotten what I came for, you've put me in such a tiz!”
“I need some shag!” barked Sandy, somehow contriving to make his moustache wiggle in time to the four syllables.
Amy was about to make a pithy retort of a vulgar nature when the shop door opened with a musical tinkle and a dog-collared figure stood in the doorway.
“What's been going on here?” asked the Reverend Plympton Bagfold, surveying the red goo on the shop floor and smeared down Amelia Myrtle's clothing.
“A trial run for when they come,” grinned Conscience. “We need to be prepared, you know!”
“None of it makes sense,” muttered Amy. “How in the name of goodness is lying in a mess of tomato goo going to prepare you for robbers?”
“We'll know how to respond,” said Amelia proudly.
“With tomato ketchup?” asked Amy.
“No,” whispered Conscience darkly, “but with blood.”
“I give up!” snapped Sandy. “I'm getting out of here! It's worse than Ypres!” And he pushed past the vicar, quite roughly seeing as he was a man of God, and stomped out of the shop muttering about mad women and how they wouldn't have been tolerated back in the good old days of the Somme.
“I need a knife,” said the Reverend Bagfold, quietly. “I've learned something that's troubled me and I need a good sharp blade.”
“Blades can be dangerous,” warned Amy. “I cut myself once, and it needed a dozen stitches.”
“It must have been some knife,” suggested Amelia. “I mean, a dozen stitches is a lot.”
“It was a lawn mower!” squawked Amy. “Now what was it I came here for?”
“Elastoplast?” asked Conscience. “For that cut of yours?”
“What cut?” asked Amy passing a hand over her head in case it was sticky with unsuspected blood.
“When you hurt yourself with a lawn mower?”
“That was when Mr Garrett was still alive, stupid!” almost shouted Amy. “It'll come to me sooner or later and meanwhile I'm going for a ride down the backs to see what's going on!”
The backs was a rough unmade road that ran behind the row of houses on the side of the street where the shop was. She'd used it as a short-cut many times, though it was longer rather than short, though she didn't see it that way.
“You coming to church on Sunday?” asked the Reverend as she squeezed past him.
“Probably not,” she replied.
“Good. Then I'll be able to have a bit of a lie in,” he said.
And she left the shop, heaved herself onto her scooter and zoomed off in the direction of the backs and the very dead body of Miles Grimsdyke from number twenty-three where he lay across the rough track, obstructing her passage and with a knife sticking grotesquely out of the middle of his back.
© Peter Rogerson 05.05.11
A PITGLOOM MURDER
Chapter One
Pitgloom may well be a small Nottinghamshire village, it's old terraced houses being built of crumbling brown bricks and its narrow streets cobbled and dusty with the accumulated dead skin and allied nasttness of the ages. It stands on a single street on a minor “B” road somewhere between the county Town of Nottingham and the ancient streets of Edwinstowe and has largely been lost to time because very little of any consequence has happened there since the old coal mine was closed in the 1960s. People lived there baxck in those rosy times, of course, and still do.
The terraced houses, all built in two long rows, one on each side of the main road, look what they are: utilitarian homes for a sub-species of humanity built by a class that didn't care. Some of them have been empty for years, others have bright white net curtains hiding the interiors from any chance passer by, and every so often you can see an old woman walking purposefully along.
There are other old women, of course, but this one is Amy Garrett. Married seventy years ago at the age of nineteen and a widow for over fifty of them, some look on her as a kind of matriarch though in truth she's nothing of the sort, being touched by suggestions of creeping dementia and frequently absorbed by antics she took part in during the 1950s when she was already too late to fall in love with Elvis Presley and his ilk, though she loved the way he wiggled his close to obscene hips.
Back then she had liked close to obscene. Back then she had liked quite a lot of things she disapproved of now. Back then she had even liked sex.
When she wasn't walking in the aforementioned purposeful way she was steering her little electric mobility scooter along, avoiding obstacles with the skill of the geriatric and hardly ever knocking anyone over. Her great grandson Miles Garrett (how the surname stretched down the generations!) had taken his tool kit to it and adjusted such things as gear ratios (it only had the one gear but that had a ratio and he'd interfered with it) and Amy was quite capable of zooming along at an alarming speed when Pixley Cavendish, the local police officer, wasn't looking, which was most of the time because Pixley had been having an affair with the Vicar's wife, Cynthia Bagfold, for the past two decades, and found it quite time-consuming. Anyway, his job was close to being a sinecure, there being little in the way of crime in the village. Crime belonged to cirties and their suburbs, not forgotten remnants of a bye-gone industrial age like Pitgloom.
At the far end of the village, and set back from the main road, was the Church (of Saint Drood), run with coquettish bad temper by the Reverend Plympton Bagfold who spent a great deal of his time wondering when the next visitor to his church would arrive. Few ever did, least of all on Sundays, but he was occasionally called on to officiate at a funeral. Christenings never happened in Pitgloom and anyone who wanted to get married opted for the Register Office in Nottingham out of preference to the church.
At the other end of the village, and like an open sore on the good Green Earth surrounding Pitgloom, was the village shop. It sold everything the local residence could hardly be expected to want and very little that they actually did want. It was run by the Myrtle twins, Amelia and Conscience, both of them well past the age that most people would consider retiring and reluctant to add to the burden of their poverty by restocking their establishment. But if anyone chanced to require a tin of steel gramophone needles or a gas mantel then their shop was the place to go.
One particular day in early May Amy Garrett knew that she needed to go to the shop. She wasn't quite sure why she wanted to go to the shop, but ten minutes earlier she had felt an urgent need for something or other and the shop was the only place she could think of of going to get it because there was always an outside chance they might stock it. Nottingham and Edwinstowe were both out of the question unless she caught the bus, and she didn't like buses because she usually found herself sitting close to someone who smelt, and that was, in her opinion, repulsive and unpleasant.
So on this particular day she set off on her mobility scooter for the shop at the end of the street. The sun was shining, the sky was blue bar the little white cotton-wool clouds that hopped and skipped across it, and she felt at one with the world. The weather was unusually warm for the time of year so she only wore two overcoats, a pink one with a brown one on top, for warmth.
“Hello Miss Garrett,” quavered a voice from a jitty that ran between two houses on the ground floor. The upper storey was untroubled by it because, as I have said, the houses were one long terrace of attached dwellings and had the jitty been the full height of the houses, and consequently separated them, it would have spoiled the notion of a terrace altogether, and that would never do.
“Well, Miss Pitcher,” replied Mrs Amy Garrett, “You are well, I trust? Hale and hearty? Full of the joys of spring?”
“I would be,” replied Eunice Pitcher, “I would be, but Oswald's gone missing again.”
“Again?” almost sneered Amy Garrett. “You ought to keep a tighter rein on that cat of yours. It'll be pooing on my back yard again, and then there'll be trouble!”
“Now don't you go threatening my Oswald!” shrieked Miss Pitcher. “It ain't him as poos everywhere! He's the only friend I've got, is that cat, and I love 'im. I love 'im more than I've ever loved any man, and that's a fact.”
“Then you should have a word with him about pooing in my back yard!” snapped Amy. “There's nowt worse anywhere under this bright blue sky than cat poo, 'specially when you walk in it and don't notice till it's all over the carpet in your best room.”
“I'll tell 'im,” muttered Eunice, who knew she wasn't a match for the Garrett woman when it came to a slanging match because she depended on lucid logic when she had a point to make, and Amy Garrett didn't. “Anyways, what you up to?”
“Shop, “ replied Amy.
“What for?” asked Eunice.
Amy shook her head irritably. “It'll come to me when I get there,” she said. “I did know, but it's gone and gorn.”
“Well, if you see my Oswald...”
“I know. I'll kick 'im!”
“You'll do no such thing!”
Amy Garrett might have replied that she almost certainly would, which wasn't strictly true, but might have been, but she had accelerated away from the jitty and anything she said would have been carried away and been rendered inaudible so far as the cat-loving Eunice Pitcher was concerned, and she knew it so she saved her breath.
The shop, when she got there, was open, and she went in, still not quite sure what she wanted but determined to remember as soon as she could because something buried in her brain told her it was vital that she did.
But something much more important loomed in front of her and drove everything else out of her mind. For lying on the floor in front of the counter in a pool of nasty red blood was one of the Myrtle twins, and standing behind that counter, holding a knife smeared and almost dripping with blood of that same colour was the other Myrtle twin. In her other hand, and tucked under her arm, was Oswald the cat, and he was purring contentedly as his feline eyes took in the scene of blood and gore and chaos all around him.
“A tin opener!” gasped Amy. “What … what on Earth … a tin opener!”
© Peter Rogerson 03.05.11
MUSICAL MEMORIES
Me, around the age of eight, before they invented pop music and life.
The older we get the more we seem to want to search into a past we might have remembered, but haven't quite. At least, that's true of me and I dared say it's probably true of quite a lot of other people, too. We need reminding, and that's what odd memories and mementoes do.
Take music, for instance. It quite often happens in my life that they play a record on the radio that I haven't heard for decades, going back to the late fifties in a few instances, and suddenly, as if it was a hit only yesterday, I can remember just about every word of it. Yet fifty years have probably passed since I last heard it and there it is in my mind, fresh and yet resonant of a different time. And I can't remember ninety percent of yesterday!
I remember when the Beatles first appeared with all their success and screaming girls and mop-heads. I remember how their forthcoming first record was heralded in advance in the New Musical Express (yes, I read that when I was in my teens and younger twenties), little advertisements on several pages that informed one and all that the the Beatles are coming!
Here they are as they were, so to speak. Thee adult generations accused them having disgracefully long hair - but look at it!
And they came and the screaming began. Girls really did wet themselves in their excitement. And they screamed themselves hoarse. I was young and single, and didn't I resent all that adulation? Of course I did! Four young fellows from Liverpool and all that crazy love for them: and I guess in quite a few instances it was love.
Why couldn't I be loved like that? What was wrong with a tone-deaf young Rugby (I lived in Rugby back then) bloke with no sense of rhythm? I wasn't a Beatle, but so what? I could have been. Once when I was travelling with a friend to college, hair a bit on the long side and studenty in a scruffy kind of way, we parked my sit-up-and-beg Ford Popular and popped into a restaurant (in Newark, of all places, where decades later I was going to meet my wonderful wife face-to-face for the first time) and two of the waitresses came up to us and asked for autographs because weren't we a pop group?
I had, for a blinkered second, a taste of fame before I owned up that no, we weren't a pop group but students on our way to college – and the autograph books disappeared, and so did the waitresses. But for the fraction of a moment whilst I was deciding not to be a prat and tell the truth I felt the warmth of false fame washing over me, and a little bit of me wanted it. Yet I'm tone deaf, have no sense of rhythm so I could never have been in a pop group back then when one pre-requisite was talent. Things seem to have changed somewhat since then!
A Ford Popular - not mine from back then because it's long since I scrapped it, but similar.
Yet when I hear one of the earlier Beatles tracks I'm transported back to those days with a tiny fragment of my mind and find myself wishing things could be like they had been back then. Suddenly I no longer resent those Beatles because two of them are dead and I'm alive, and my life has been rewarded by the company of my angel-wife.
And other records, those I might have supposed I'd forgotten long since, they sometimes get played and even though I suddenly discover they're far from forgotten, they bring back a flavour of yesteryear, and it's wonderful.
When I was driving away from my college for the last time the song Those were the Days by Mary Hopkin was riding high in the pop charts, and it meant so much in a choking sort of way, because those had been the days. And every time I've heard it since then I've been swamped by the immediacy of the nostalgia I felt back in my red-blood days. It's only in the last few years that I've had time, I suppose, to look at life from the perspective of Mary Hopkin's kind of days, and say these are the days....
Mary Hopkin, those were the days when she was the angel of my memories.
But the music's from a lost past. I'm typing this and listening to a CD of the Queen tribute band Mercury, and enjoying it, and that music's a great deal more immediate than that of my New Musical Express days. But though it still isn't Buddy Holly or Lonnie Donegan or Joe Brown or any of the heroes of mine that painted each day with the richness of a young life I was living, I love it.
I'm now going to sound like my parents' generation, but when I listen to what my brain tells me is turgid crap that the youngsters listen to today I wonder if their old age will be layered by memories of their musical past, the crotch-grabbing incoherent leering rappers that leave me stone cold when I see them on the television. Probably, of course, but I can't for the life of me understand how.
© Peter Rogerson 01.05.11
WELCOME TO MY WORLD
One of my favourite watches.
We humans always like to welcome new members into our various clubs, and I'm as willing and enthusiastic as anyone else to do exactly that, which is why I welcome such smiling and benevolent characters as Mormon or Christian Scientist missionaries when they knock my door, not that they do that very often these days – they've probably heard that it's dangerous for men in possession of an absurd faith to get into a learned conversation with little me, or they are getting fewer and further between as a consequence of an increase in rational thought. Anyway, the whole conversation that may ensue is fair enough because we're both playing the same game. They want to convert me and I will (given long enough) convert them.
It's the same in other walks of life, and you're always welcome to my club.
I've got a sort of addiction to things that wind up.
This machine works really well, has astounding volume fort something that is little more than a horn, and runs at a constant speed.
I love old gramophones and the wonderfully primitive way they reproduce sounds even though a decent MP3 player sounds quite a percentage better. So I might drool and dribble as I extol the virtue of a 78 rpm recording of King Elvis which scratches its way through his Jailhouse Rock and listen with supreme indifference to the same track from a modern MP-something player with its crystal-clear intonation and undistorted range of musical tones. So I have hundreds of old recordings |(from the 1950s), though I'm prepared to share the following snippet with you: I hardly ever listen to any of them. The machines wind up and work and the music plays as well as it ever did, which the cynical might suggest wasn't very well, , and that's all I really care.
Then take time. It's no secret that I have a penchant for clocks and watches, of which there are two main varieties: either clockwork (where the word comes from, for goodness' sake) and quartz, though there are a few hybrid mechanisms in which a battery keeps a spring wound up, and that spring drives the clock. It's basically clockwork with the heavy duty work taken out! So I spend quite a bit of my time winding things up. I have clocks that need winding daily, others that last for a week and a couple more that only need winding up on a monthly basis. And, of course, quite a lot of staunchly reliable and accurate quartz clocks that rarely need any attention at all until they catch me out by requiring a change of battery. Like the old gramophone, though, I get all weak at the knees when I think of my clockwork clocks (and watches – I have some of those, too) and can dismiss the more accurate quartz ones with barely any acknowledgement of their worth.
This clock is a particular favourite because it's beautiful and yet I bought it from the manager of the Sibsey Trader Windmill in Lincolnshire, a clock and (joy of joys) windmill enthusiast.
Finally, and with a shuddering heart after glancing at the last photograph, I love windmills, real ones rather than the modern affairs that generate electricity - mills rather than turbines, that is. You don't have to wind them up, of course (think of the power a spring would need to grind the tons of wheat into flour that a decent windmill gets through every day), but they are sort of related in my mind. Nature does the work, the winds that blow even gently can produce enough flour for a fair few loaves of bread! And they rotate, don't they? Clockwise?
It only seems right and proper that, if I'm going to include an illustration of a windmill, it should be the Sibsey Trader Windmill, where I bought the aforementioned clock.
So we have springs that, when put under tension, store the strength of my muscles and then release it slowly, either to play a record or move a couple of hands around a clock or watch face, and we have the wind that contains within it enough raw power to grind massive stones together when those stones weigh tons!
I must remember those things next time the missionaries knock my door. I must remember to explain that they work according to well-understood natural laws that always have and always will be in place, and not a breath of magic anywhere! And they'd be welcome into my club any day, to listen to strains of scratchy 1950s rock 'n' roll and the sonorous bongs of my clocks on the hour. And if they're amenable I might even offer them a slice of bread filled with the goodness of the wild, wild winds.
© Peter Rogerson 19.04.11
A WEEK IN PICTURES
We're back after having spent a week in Boston in the caravan.
Now, I reckon that I have friends on Gather in the four corners of the planet and maybe they don't all know what I mean by Boston, so I'll explain that Boston is a town in Lincolnshire, England from which the famous Pilgrim Fathers tried to flee our country in the seventeenth century in search of religious freedom, They were caught in the act as escaping the country was a criminal offence back then and eventually had to seek an alternative. Many places here still bear the word “Pilgrim” in their names, notably the large hospital in Boston, the Pilgrim Hospital where my wife and I spent several hours last week visiting her daughter, who was receiving chemotherapy for cancer.
But what of the rest of the “week in Boston in the caravan” bit? Is that clear enough or do different versions of the English language translate the words differently? I'm not so sure, so I'll be really explicit, which will give me an opportunity to incorporate some photos of the place.
The entrance from a minor road to the camp-site
The view across the road from the camp-site – a field of daffodils, which are grown commercially in parts of Lincolnshire.
One of the many attractive bushes and shrubs that encircle the field we park on.
Another view of the perimeter.
A third glance at the verdant décor
Our caravan as seen from the tap (not shown) which provides fresh water, and the car which tows the caravan when we need to move back home.,.
The caravan in which we sleep, eat, bathe and watch telly,
Magazine-reading Dorothy
I think wild-flowers, even daisies and dandelions, are worth a second look.
And there you have it: a graphic account of our past week. I hope it puts our absence from Gather into some sort of context!!!
© Peter Rogerson 17.04.11
