The Book of Memories

The Book of Memories

(Or the story of the flying donkey that hides behind the moon and eats raw sausages and marmalade without any pepper.)

Introduction

Now, if you are looking for some gentle amusement with a touch of mystery and magic in an earlier age far friendlier than today but still well within living memory for some, read on and enjoy a pleasant journey back in time with me. Not too far back, only to the summer of 1955 where we might just find ourselves on the South Coast of England.

The hardships and shortages of World War II were then but a close memory and the so-called affluent days of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s ‘You’ve never had it so good!’ are still a good two years in the future. Brylcream-haired, winkle-picker-shoed teddy boys and their beehive-hairstyles, wide-skirted girlfriends jive on the summer sands to Bill Haley and His Comet’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ from their badly-tuned portable battery wireless, while their parents sit leisurely at home in front of an unlit coal fire - she knitting, he smoking his briar pipe - as they listen perhaps to the smoother tones of Frank Sinatra crooning ‘Love and Marriage’ out of an expensive walnut-veneered Ferguson Radiogram. Overseas package holidays to Benidorm are a decade away in the future; most families, if they are lucky, manage a week away by the sea each year in one of the growing number of holiday camps or, if they are more conservative, tolerate bed and breakfast at a seaside guesthouse with the ubiquitous inhospitable landlady and her list of house rules.

But it is an age of innocence - long before computers, mobile phones, video recorders and the internet - young children have a simple view of life, now long since lost; they wear woolen or home-knitted clothing and gaze at the world through round National Health spectacles, the broken wire arms or the bridge between the lenses invariably repaired with pink Elastoplast. Rag-and-bone men with sorry-looking nags hand out day-old-chicks or white mice in return for old clothes, newspapers and things no-one else considers of any use; butcher shops are festooned with bulging-eyed rabbits suspended by their hind legs, un-plucked chickens and pheasants, and butchered half-carcasses of sheep, cows and pigs. On the beach men roll up their suit trousers to go paddling and wear knotted white handkerchiefs to keep the sun from their balding heads whilst flash young lads sport witty Kiss-Me-Quick hats set at what they think is a stylish angle.

And, the highlight of all this seaside entertainment, next to the pier theatre with its jukeboxes and one-armed-bandits and away from the braying line of tethered donkeys, pooping on the sand whilst suffering their interminable screeching juvenile riders - is the traditional seaside Punch and Judy Show.

Chapter One

Imagine, if you will, the noise of an old fashioned typewriter as it clacks out the first line of a strange and mystic rhyme - some say it was written by the devil himself to deprive innocents of their memories - but that we shall see.

Memories of childhood are the sweetest things

Remember it yourself if you can but I shall remind you later, just in case you lose your memory too. I am not talking about simple forgetfulness from which we all suffer, especially as I am now over 120 years old, but something far more sinister. Yet our journey is already rushing ahead as we find ourselves, first of all, in front of a row of Victorian two-storey terraced houses with tiny front gardens, such as are to be found in every town and city throughout England. In amongst - indeed in the centre - of this particular row of almost identical drab houses is a run-down eyesore with peeling paintwork, sagging guttering, and pieces of cardboard stuck over a couple of broken panes of glass in the windows. The front garden contains a galvanised metal dustbin overflowing with rubbish, a discarded ironing board and a broken armchair exuding horsehair. The houses either side, in contrasting neatness, make it stand out all the more. A middle-aged woman, on her hands and knees (and with her vast backside turned towards us) scrubs the front doorstep of the house on the left while a young girl, with plaits and her skirt tucked into her navy blue knickers, is skipping in the garden of the house on the right.

As the strange attraction of this dilapidated house draws us nearer we can hear the noise of a television in the front parlour which becomes more and more audible. It is Annette Mills playing the piano and singing ‘Muffin the Mule’. (We like Muffin, Muffin the Mule; Dear old Muffin, playing the Fool…..) and through the dirty windows we might steal a glance of a man’s feet sticking up in the air. These lower extremities are clad in different coloured knitted socks, one red, through which the man’s entire heel is exposed, and the other yellow, from which a big toe protrudes.

Beyond those feet is a small 1950’s television, the glass screen neither taller nor wider than a child’s hand and half the size of the cheap veneered wooden casing of the set. And on it, a flickering back-and-white image of the string puppet Muffin the Mule which flickers and slides slowly up and down the screen unable to settle itself. Below the TV and the owner of the feet is a man, lying half-asleep on his back in the seat of an armchair with his legs propped up on the back of the chair. He is rather short - dumpy in fact - in his mid twenties, and wears a brightly coloured cardigan and a knitted bobble-hat on his head.

The room is as untidy and peculiar as its solitary occupant. The walls, it seems, are painted with a mismatch of contrasting colours from leftover emulsion, judging from the empty paint cans lined up along the tiled mantle-piece. Screwed-up newspapers are strewn around, and the place is further cluttered with old boots, a dismantled bicycle, a push lawnmower, and other odd objects. In a dented galvanised bucket in the corner stands a long-dead needle-less Christmas tree, still covered in a few decorations cut from pieces of newspaper. The man - and we shall shortly get to know him as Mr Nobody - has his eyes closed and lazily waves a knitting needle as if it were a conductor’s batten. He places it on his top lip and holds it there by crinkling his nose, which causes him to sneeze and the needle flies away.

The distraction of a baby’s loud cries coming from the adjoining room cause one of Mr Nobody’s bulging eyes to pop open with a start. The crying becomes louder and both eyes open and stare inquisitively around. He frowns as if he cannot understand the meaning of the noise, looks annoyed, reaches across to turn the television up louder to cover the sound of the crying, then subsides back into his semi-slumber.

Outside, his wife, Mrs Nobody who sadly is a plain woman in her early twenties and dressed in a brown overcoat and a mop hat, is walking down the pavement, returning home with a heavy bag of groceries. As she nears the house she hears the cries of her baby and the noise of the television, which become louder as she approaches. Alarmed, she hurries to the front gate, which falls off the hinges as she attempts to open it and cracks her on the shins. Exasperated she pushes it away, only to spill several items of groceries from her shopping bag. Hastily she gathers them up and shoves them back into her bag. The last item she picks up is a can of marrowfat peas and, in anger, she hurls it through one of the glass panes of the front downstairs window. She rushes up to the front door and reaches in through the letter box to retrieve the Yale key that hangs inside on a piece of string but, as she withdraws her hand, the letter box flap snaps shut on her fingers causing her to let out a cry of pain. She inserts the key in the front door lock, gives it a turn, then kicks the bottom of the sticking door a couple of times before it opens. She enters, knocking empty milk-bottles over, and slams the door harshly behind her.

Collecting the screaming baby, Mrs Nobody bursts angrily into the front parlour. The baby is wrapped in a white shawl and has a white knitted cap which covers most of its head so almost all that is visible is the large open mouth, bawling loudly. She pushes her husband’s legs off the back of the chair causing him to tumble onto the floor, and shouts at him.

‘What on earth is going on? Couldn’t you hear baby screaming its head off?’

A mystified Mr Nobody looks at her. ‘What? What? Dumbly dirt, eat yer shirt!’

‘You heard! You could hear him at the end of the street, poor little mite. Haven’t you fed him, like I told you to?’

Mr Nobody looks confused, reaches over and turns off the television. ‘Feed him? Feed him? You never said anything about that!’

‘Oh, for goodness sake, don’t start all that again. I ain’t been gone half an hour, surely?

And I told you to keep writing everything down in your notebook and said special that you have to keep looking at it. Why don’t you ever listen?’

Mr Nobody assumes an air of arrogance. ‘Listen? Notebook? What on earth are you rambling on about, you daft woman?’

‘Your notebook, I keep telling you!’

‘What? I don’t have a notebook.’

‘Yes you blooming do! Yes you do!’ Mrs Nobody had reached such a height of perplexity that quite amused her husband but which then declined into frustration.

‘No I don’t! No I don’t! Rubbish! Fuffish! Oh, you! I’ve just had about enough of you and all the nonsense you come out with.’

‘And I’ve had more than enough of you. Nobody by name, and nobody by blooming nature. I’m fed up with you. I’m leaving you, I am, so help me, leaving you for ever and good blooming riddance.’

‘Language, please, please! Not in front of the baby.’

Mrs Nobody lets out a howl of exasperation, then dashes out sobbing. Mr Nobody listens to her feet thump up the stairs and he looks up at the ceiling and the swinging ceiling-hung lampshade as he hears her moving about in the bedroom.

A while later, after some fiddling with the knob on his television fails to produce a visual image, he, somewhat sheepishly, stomps upstairs, his hands in his pockets. Mrs Nobody, still sobbing, has laid the baby on the bed and is hastily stuffing a battered suitcase with clothes.

‘You’re not really leaving, are you?’

Mrs Nobody glares at him with something amidst exasperation and hate. ‘Yes, I blooming well am leaving you so don’t try and stop me this time.’

‘This time? This time? What do you mean this time? You’ve never tried to leave me before.’

Mrs Nobody finds something between exasperation and hate, perhaps it is just despair? ‘Oh, for crying out loud! I’ve tried to leave you a dozen times before and you’ve stopped me. A dozen times! Look in your blooming book!’

‘Look, I’m telling you I don’t have a book - have a look, no book! - and you’re really annoying me with this nonsense. You really are. Look ‘ere! As far as I’m concerned you can ruddy well go!’

Mrs Nobody hesitates for a moment and suddenly looks scared. ‘You mean you’re not

going to try to stop me this time then?’

‘This time? There you go again! You’re mad, woman. No, I’m not going to try and stop you , in fact, here, let me blooming well help.’

With that he slams the suitcase shut, snatches it up and hurls it through the glass of the front window. Mrs Nobody lets out a shriek. Her husband chuckles as he shouts out ‘Beware, beware, flying underwear!’

Below, anyone outside in this otherwise respectable terraced street would have witnessed the view of the front upstairs bedroom window exploding outwards as the suitcase is thrown through. As it flies open Mrs Nobody’s clothes flutter down all over the front garden. The young girl next door with her shirt tucked into her knickers, holds up a pink brassiere, tries it over her flat chest and the discards it over the wall onto the pavement as too big. A spiv, striding past in a tight striped suit, snatches it up, stuffs it into his jacket and acknowledges thanks with a tug on his pulled-down fedora

Meanwhile Mrs Nobody, still shrieking, has picked up the baby and dashed out of the room. Mr Nobody sits down on the bed, listens to her leave the house and the slam of the front door behind her. The jolt causes a wooden cuckoo, wrapped in a baby’s sock, to pop out of a Swiss cuckoo clock. It makes a sad muffled noise then sags motionless on the end of its spring.

Mr Nobody suddenly realises there is something hard in his pocket and reaches in and extracts a small notebook. It is full of scribbled notes and drawings and he starts to read.

Half an hour or so later, with the background sound of his beloved ballet music still echoing in his ears, a tall thin police constable cycles slowly up to the front of Mr Nobody’s house and stops with a squeaking of brakes at the kerb. In an arabesque ballet-like movement he leans fully forward over the handlebars, throws out his right leg horizontally behind him, then pivots round so as to dismount elegantly onto the pavement. With equally graceful and purposeful movements he props the bicycle by a pedal on the kerb, then bows forward deeply to take off his cycle clips - one in each hand - in one smooth movement. He carefully unbuttons his top breast pocket, conscientiously places the cycle clips inside, then does up the button, before allowing himself to look at Mr Nobody’s house. Humming with the memory of a resplendent string quartet backed up by an undertone of oboes and other wind instruments he could not even begin to name, he takes brave steps forward like a true Valkerie, not appreciating that they were actually women. Withdrawing the truncheon from his belt and holding it upright against his side, he pushes the wrecked gate aside and takes two deliberate and lengthy strides into the front garden. He looks around, jerking his head rather than moving his eyes, at the strewn clothing and takes some moments to work out what has happened, then decides that this is perhaps a matter best left to a Senior Police Detective with reinforcements, not a matter for a lone constable of a mere twenty-six years standing.

However, after a few more seconds reconsidering the situation, and the thought that the nearest Police Box is a mile or more away, he strides purposely up to the front door and hammers loudly with the tip of his truncheon. When there is no answer he takes two or three wide steps sideways so he can look in through the broken glass in the downstairs window. Observing nothing untoward he takes two large steps backwards and looks up to try if he can see anything through the broken upstairs window. He calls up to the bedroom.

‘Mr Nobody!’ His shout is in a falsetto voice that he realises is entirely inappropriate. He coughs, eases his tight trousers down from his crutch and calls again in his normal deeper voice. ‘Mr Nobody? It’s me again. PC Leftleg. Now, I know you are in there so come and speak to me before you get into even more trouble.’

Mr Nobody’s grinning face appears through the broken window frame. ‘Ah, Constabule. What on earth brings you here?’

‘You know very well why I’m here, Mr Nobody. Yet another domestic I see. I’ve cautioned you about this before.’

‘What? No you haven’t! Nothing like this has ever happened to me before!’

‘Third incident this month. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten this time.’

‘This time? This time? Don’t you ruddy start! Here, here, if you want an incident, how about this? Mr Nobody disappears back into the bedroom and then reappears with a chamber pot. ‘I hope you can swim!’

With a grin he