I Looked Over the Edge and Gasped

(This story comes from a challenge to write 1000 words beginning with "I looked over the edge and gasped".)

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I looked over the edge and gasped. Far below were jagged rocks and an angry sea – certain death were I to fall over. But what was the choice? Behind – chasing me to the edge – was a herd of cows that saw me as their enemy. My choice was to be trampled to death or take my chance with the rocks and the sea.

But it wasn’t the rocks that had prompted my gasp. It was the herd of fears that were climbing the cliff and coming in my direction. They were the fears I remembered from my past, that had terrified me at some stage in my life and which my subconscious mind had never allowed me to forget.

I could see my five-year-old self on my first day at Stanley Green Infants School. My mother had left me at the school gate, thinking that I would be in safe hands from that point on. What she didn’t know was that this was the gate that the older children used, and that younger kids who approached from this direction had to walk through a playground full of giants in order to reach their own assembly point. These monsters were six-year-old children who had been going to school for a whole year and were highly trained in the art of bullying five-year-olds – very scary!

A much more tangible fear then rushed up the cliff towards me. I was on my bike, aged about 13, and was cycling along the main road through Hamworthy heading for the Fire Station. I was in the Scouts and taking a course leading to the Firefighters Badge, so this was a regular Friday evening trip for a few weeks that year. However, I had just reached the junction with Lake Road when I realised that the guy on a motorbike turning out of Lake Road had not seen me and was not going to stop. Years before I had witnessed an accident when a cyclist had been badly injured after being hit by a motorbike, and now it was my turn to be left as a mangled heap in the middle of the road.

These fears were coming at me in no particular order. Next it was a moment at Oakdale Junior School, aged seven, when I had been caught talking in class and threw a complete wobbly because Mrs Moore had only seen me telling me Michael Burgess to shut up and Michael was the real culprit because he had started it. Our classroom was in a hut across the road from the main school and Mrs Moore used her phone to summon Mr Boyd, the head teacher, who everyone knew had a cane in his office that he used on very naughty children. When Mr Boyd arrived he grabbed hold of my arm and dragged me back to his office. I was literally kicking and screaming – I landed a pretty good kick on Mr Boyd’s shin. The worst was bound to happen now.

The next fear was a real life-threatener. I was driving along the A36 towards Salisbury, at the time when I was working at the Technical College and spent the weekends with my wife-to-be in Weston-Super-Mare. On this Monday morning I was running late and got stuck behind a slow-moving lorry. Surely there would be a chance to overtake at some point? At last the opportunity presented itself – I pulled out and made my move. However, round the next bend came an even larger lorry, heading straight for me, and I realised that I had made a wrong decision. My elderly VW Beetle simply did not have the acceleration to overtake in time and my only chance was for the drivers of both lorries to slam on their brakes and let me squeeze through the narrow gap that presented itself. Would they or wouldn’t they?

Throughout school and college I had performed in a number of plays and Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and a whole crop of fears revolved around forgetting my lines or falling over the furniture. Singing the Admiral’s patter song in HMS Pinafore was a particular fear – there were six verses and every possibility of getting them in the wrong order. However, the fear that came closest to me up the cliff was from a much earlier performance, when it was not my mistake but a fellow actor’s that nearly did for me. This was during my second year at Poole Grammar School and our English teacher wanted to present a translated medieval French play – the Farce of Master Pierre Pathelin – in front of the whole school. I somehow landed the part of the judge. During the trial scene, in which the plot elements come together and all is resolved, one of the other boys jumped about ten lines, leaving me with a real dilemma. Should I carry on with the line that followed the one he should have spoken or the one that followed the one he actually used? Either way the result could have been utter confusion but I had no time in which to decide the best course. 

And then another fear popped its head over the cliff edge and I was again back to very early childhood and on a family picnic in a field somewhere in Dorset. During the picnic a herd of sheep had come into the field and were now ranged across the path leading to where we had parked the car. I was utterly terrified of those fierce white wooly beasts and had no recourse other than tantrum mode.

On that occasion the sheep, not surprisingly, fled in just as much panic as I was displaying, although their alarmed “baas” only added to my terror. However, those baas seemed to be coming from all round me – not only from the cliff but behind me. I looked round and saw that the angry cows had metamorphosed into sheep. There was no longer anything to fear.

None of those early fears had been fulfilled. I was not bullied by six-year-olds, Mr Boyd did not cane me, I escaped from the bike accident with only a few bruises and my stupid overtaking move taught me a useful lesson and made me a better driver. I never forgot my lines and nobody seemed to notice the Pierre Pathelin hiccup. 

Nightmares are just that – transitory fears that have gone in the morning. However, you can learn from past fears and apply the lessons to the future - if you’ve got any sense.

© John Welford

The Doctor Looked at Me

This story started with a challenge to write something original beginning with the line: "The doctor looked at me - he wasn't smiling".

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The Doctor looked at me. He wasn’t smiling. Laughing his head off would be a more accurate description.

“Are you serious?” he said, “You want to hire the Tardis and me for a day so that you can give William Shakespeare a history lesson?”

“That’s the plan”, I said. “Dear old Bill wrote some wonderful plays, but he was a bit wayward with his facts. I think it would help him to see things in perspective if he knew what really happened. I’m not suggesting that we get him to rewrite his plays, merely that we snatch him from a time shortly before he died – after he had finished writing – and let him know the truth so that he doesn’t die in ignorance.”

So that’s what we did. We parked the Tardis round the back of his house in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1616 and surprised him when he popped out for a quick visit to the privy.

“Who the Hell are you?” he said, having apparently forgotten to speak in Shakespearean English.

“This is the Doctor and I’m just some bloke from the 21^st century”, I said. Oddly enough, he seemed to find this statement far less puzzling than I would have expected. I suspect that he had been getting seriously sozzled on ale for the preceding hour or two - hence the need for the privy visit – and so was able to take such extraordinary statements at face value.

“What’s this odd-looking box?” he asked. “Is it a new sort of privy? I really need a pee.”

“Pop inside and have a look”, said the Doctor, “It’s the second door on the left and mind you flush it when you’ve finished”.

As soon as William had disappeared through the door of the Tardis the Doctor and I followed him in and therefore had him trapped when he had finished in the loo. Once we had calmed him down and got him used to the idea of the Tardis being bigger on the inside than the outside, I told him that the plan was to put him right over some of his historical facts.

I had originally thought about going back to the time of Julius Caesar and showing him that clocks didn’t strike three or any other hour in Ancient Rome, on the grounds that they hadn’t been invented yet, but this seemed a bit negative to me and not a very good use of the Tardis, so I reckoned on starting with a trip to London in pursuit of the truth about King Richard III and the Princes in the Tower.

We therefore landed in a pleasant looking room in the Constable’s house at the Tower of London, which was where King Richard’s two nephews, Edward and Richard, were being looked after in a reasonable degree of comfort. When the Tardis door opened there were the two princes, staring in astonishment at the mid-20^th century Police telephone box that had suddenly appeared in their room.

Naturally we had to go through the same explanations for the princes that we had for William Shakespeare, and they also wanted to use the onboard loo, but once all that was done we needed to explain a few things to them about their likely fate if they stayed where they were.

“But I’m the King”, said young Edward. “Uncle Richard has just placed us here so that all the arrangements can be made for my coronation. I shall have a long and glorious reign as King Edward V.”

“But what you don’t know”, I said, “is that your lovely Uncle Richard is – as we speak – getting Parliament to pass a law that says that your mummy and daddy weren’t really married and that therefore the two of you are - pardon the word – bastards”.

“What?” said Edward, “So you mean to say that he’s going to be King instead of me? The bastard!”

“To be perfectly accurate”, said William, “He’s not the bastard – you are.”

 “And it also proves”, he said, turning to me, “that I wasn’t wrong about King Richard. He did seize the throne and murder the princes.”

“Murder?” said young Prince Richard. “But I don’t want to die. What can we do?”

“You can escape”, I said, “courtesy of the good Doctor here and this box, which is called the Tardis, by the way.”

We therefore hustled the boys aboard and soon whisked them away from the Tower to freedom.

“You see”, I said to Bill Shakespeare, “history only relates that the boys disappeared from the Tower. You, and many other people, assumed that they had been murdered but there was never any proof. Now you know what really happened.”

“I see”, said William, “but what happened to them after they escaped?”

“I’ll show you,” I said. “I think you’ll like this bit”.

We landed in a forest somewhere in the heart of England. We ushered the boys off the Tardis and I gave them instructions about what they should do next. I told them that it was essential that they forgot all about their past lives and told nobody who they really were. They should also split up, because there was too great a risk of them giving the game away if they were overheard talking to each other and let slip some incriminating details.

They didn’t much like the last bit, but accepted it as necessary for their safety.

We watched from a safe distance as the boys wandered off and were met by two families who were taking a stroll in the woods. Before long the boys had gone off with them, one to each family.

“So are they safe now?” asked William. “Is that the end of the story?”

“Not quite”, I said. “You see, the boys are going to be adopted by those families, whose names are Shakespeare and Arden. Young Edward Shakespeare will grow up and have a family of his own, as will Richard Arden. They will have grandchildren – John and Mary – who will marry each other and a have a child called …”

“William!” said William. “You mean that I am descended from the Princes in the Tower? That’s wonderful news!”

William buzzed with excitement as we made the journey back to his own time.

“You know”, he said, “when you arrived I was just about to go down to the pub to meet my old playwriting mates Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton. I can’t wait to tell them my news. Perhaps we can write a new play between us that tells the true story about the princes and William Shakespeare’s ancestry.”

But of course that never happened. That was the day on which William Shakespeare was taken violently ill – maybe the result of too much alcohol and over-excitement – and he died a few days later without having had the chance to tell anybody.

Thus the story never got told – until now, that is.

© John Welford

Fairies Versus Witches: a story

Macbeth had a bit of a shock as he crossed the blasted heath. There – gathered round a camp fire – were three mysterious other-worldly figures, namely Oberon, Titania and Puck.

“Wotcha”, said Oberon, “How are you doing?”

“What are you doing here?” asked Macbeth. ”I was expecting witches, not fairies.”

“Union rules”, said Titania. “We’re all members of the NUSB”.

“That’s the National Union of Supernatural Beings”, Puck added. “The witches are due their tea break so we’re filling in while they have it. Don’t worry, they’ll be back later.”

“And in the meantime”, said Oberon, “We’re at your service”.

“If I recall correctly”, said Macbeth, “You’re in the love potion business, and I don’t think that’s something I need.”

“We have a few other sidelines”, said Titania. “How about three wishes?”

“Three wishes?” said Macbeth. “I don’t recall Bill Shakespeare mentioning fairies granting wishes. That’s pantomime stuff.”

“How do you know he didn’t write pantomimes in his spare time?” said Puck. “He might have done for all you know”.

“Anyway”, said Oberon, “that’s the deal. We will grant you three wishes, subject to the usual rules.”

“Which are?”

“No wishing for more wishes, and be very careful what you wish for. We tend to take people at their word in this business, and things don’t always turn out as expected.”

“Mind you”, said Titania, “We’ve had quite a few successes and many of our clients have walked away very happy”.

“Such as?”

“Well”, said Oberon, “There was that guy from Liverpool who wanted the Blues to win the Premiership. And another guy from North London said exactly the same thing, oddly enough. We made sure that a team wearing blue did actually win, so both of them got what they wanted ... I think”.

“And what about all those people from America with funny voices?” said Titania. “They all wanted to be the ‘Republican nominee’ – whatever that is – and it was a bit tricky because they couldn’t all have their wish granted.”

“So what did you do?” asked Macbeth. “I wish you’d tell me, then I might have a clue how to phrase my own three wishes.”

Oberon was only too happy to explain. “We simply said that the Republicans would get the right guy if they played their cards right. We sat each of them down and played a few hands of whist. They soon got the message – namely that the trump card always wins”.

“And were they happy with that?” Macbeth asked.

“Well”, said Puck, “The guy with the silly hair was – I’m not so sure about the rest.”

“OK”, said Oberon, “Maybe we’d better hear what your two wishes are”.

“Two?” said Macbeth. “I thought you said I had three”.

“You weren’t listening, were you”, said Titania. “You’ve already used up one wish by saying ‘I wish you’d tell me’, so you’re definitely down to two now”.

“That’s not fair!” said Macbeth. “I wish you’d just be straight with me and not play all these tricks.”

“My God, you’re so stupid” said Titania. “And that’s being as straight as I can manage. Is it any wonder you don’t survive Act Five?  That’s two wishes down, one to go. Be very careful now.

“I just wish …” said Macbeth.

“Ye-ss?” said the fairies in chorus.

“ … I’d never set eyes on any of you!” said Macbeth.

“Your wish is our command” said Oberon, as he and the other fairies disappeared with a faint ‘pop’ and their places were taken by the witches that Macbeth had been expecting to meet in the first place.  

“Phew!” said Macbeth. “You don’t know how relieved I am to see you. At least with you witches I’ll get some straightforward predictions with no silly games. Everything you say will be straight down the middle and utterly devoid of hidden meanings.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” said the leader of the witches. “When it comes to witches versus fairies you can always trust a witch. Mind you, I do have to agree with Titania on one fundamental point.”

“Which is?” asked Macbeth.

“You really are incredibly stupid”.

© John Welford

A poem about cheese

“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” G K Chesterton

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The challenge is to tell a tale

That makes one long for Wensleydale,

Or maybe pen a line or two

That calls for Brie or Shropshire Blue.

Of course it never should be said

That there’s no place for Leicester, Red.

And could you ever be so silly

Not to try a good Caerphilly?

Was ever soul so lost or deader

That would ignore the claims of Cheddar?

The land of Shakespeare, Blake and Milton

Is famed for Lancashire and Stilton.

Perhaps it’s once more time to foster

A taste for good old Double Gloucester.

It surely would be far from fair

To spurn a piece of Camembert.

Or will you go for something rarer

Like Trappista or Graviera?

Some folk say you can’t do better

Than Mozzarella, Yarg or Feta.

Can I hear you shouting louder

For Emmental, Edam or Gouda?

Or are you only merely thinking

Bishops should be eaten Stinking?

One only hopes that lines like these

Have made you want to eat some cheese.

 © John Welford

Shakespeare 400 years on

“Four hundred years is a long time”, said Polonius. “It’s a long time to be dead”.

“I know”, said Shylock. “But he left behind a few things to remember him by. You and me, for example.”

“Very true”, said Polonius. “And not just us. There’s Falstaff, and Prospero, and Romeo and Juliet, and King Henry V …”

“But Henry existed anyway”, said Shylock. “Bill Shakespeare didn’t invent him.”

“True”, said Polonius, “but nobody thinks today about Henry V without remembering the Shakespeare version, however inaccurate it might be”.

“And ditto for Macbeth, Richard III, Julius Caesar and a few others”, said Shylock. “But does it matter?”

“Not really”, said Polonius. “It’s the drama that counts. As my mate Hamlet says, ‘the play’s the thing’”.

“Your mate?” said Shylock. “Didn’t he stick a sword in you in Act Three?”

“Indeed he did”, said Polonius. “But it was a case of mistaken identity, so I can’t really hold it against him. And I always come back to life for the next performance, which I’ve been doing the past four hundred and more years, just like you”.

“And that’s the point, isn’t it?” said Shylock. “People have been talking about us for four centuries, which they wouldn’t have done if Bill hadn’t created us. And he gave us some great lines – how about my ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed; if you tickle us, do we not laugh’; I love that line.

“I’ve got some good ones too”, said Polonius. “I particularly like ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’”.

“Hang about”, said Shylock, “that’s my whole profession gone for a Burton there.”

“Perhaps you should have followed my advice”, said Polonius. “Moneylending didn’t do you much good, did it? You ended up losing the lot.”

“At least I was still alive in Act Five”, said Shylock. “And it would have been a pretty boring play without me as the villain of the piece.”

“And there’s something else to think about”, said Polonius. “I wonder if there are people today, four hundred years on, who are making up little stories about you and me and all the other characters, and having all sorts of fun as they imagine what we might be saying to each other had we really existed?”

“Come off it”, said Shylock. “You don’t think there’s anyone around who’s that daft, do you?”

© John Welford

Mr Jakes

It being the first of October, and Autumn definitely in the Forest air, I took myself down to the pub for a lunchtime pint to cheer myself up.

The usual crowd were there at the Duke’s Head, but I took a table in the corner and comforted myself with a pint of the local brew. I caught the eye of one of the regulars, whom everyone simply calls Mr Jakes – if he has a first name there are not many people who know it, so we just call him by his surname. He doesn’t seem to mind. Mr Jakes doesn’t mind anything very much; he’s our local “philosopher”, but not generally guaranteed to cheer you up.

Mr Jakes came over. He noticed what I was drinking – “Reverend James” it’s called, dark and bitter. It suited my mood, and probably his, knowing the sort of man he was. But today, he surprised me.

“Look out of the window”, he said. “What do you see?”

“Trees”, I said “Changing colour, losing their leaves, getting to ready to shut down for winter.”

“Like you, you mean?” he said. “Do you think you’ve reached your Autumn? Are you now lean and slippered as you look forward to second childishness?”

“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that”, I said, “But you might have a point”.

“Well think again”, he said. “I know I’ve got this reputation for being an old curmudgeon, but deep down I’ve got another side, and I love Autumn. When you take a second look at the Forest I think you will too, because each of those trees turning a different shade bears a special message, just as if some lover had nailed it on with a hammer.”

He sensed my puzzlement.

“Listen”, he said. “A leaf on a tree is like a little factory. It uses sunshine to make sugars. It draws in carbon dioxide and shoves out oxygen. It does that all through spring and summer, but then it decides to retire and it throws off its green work overalls to reveal what was there all along – the real leaf in its true golden or red colours. It now does nothing at all but enjoys being what it is and shows itself off to the world as it dances in the breeze. It’s the best time a leaf could have – no work, all play.”

“And your meaning is?” I asked.

“That could be you,” said Mr Jakes. “You’ve finished your working days and you now have your Autumn to enjoy, being just what you want to be and doing just what you want to do. You can put on a show, let people know what you’re good at, start something new that you’ve never done before, go to those places you’ve been to before. Or, to put it another way, now that you’ve reached your Autumn, life can be just as you like it”.

© John Welford

Random meetings

When I worked in London during the late 1970s I had a number of random meetings with people who were in the public eye, but these encounters had nothing to do with any action on my part that might have been expected to lead to them. I did not move in exalted circles – I merely went for walks at lunchtime along the same streets that people far more famous than I also happened to be using.

I therefore had to apologise to government minister Willie Whitelaw, with whom I once collided in St James’s Park, and I spotted Michael Foot limping along on his way to an Indian restaurant. A car stopped to allow me to cross the road – the driver was David Hockney. I popped into a bookshop where Frank Muir and Dennis Norden were signing copies of one of their “My Word” books – there was nobody else there, so I had a five-minute chat with them.

In another bookshop Spike Milligan was signing books. I bought a copy of “Adolf Hitler: my part in his downfall”, which he duly signed. “You’re too kind”, I said. “Sometimes three kind”, he replied. On the way back to my place of work I passed Leon Trotsky eating a hotdog. OK – not the real Leon Trotsky but an actor having a break during filming in Carlton House Terrace.

It might sound as though these meetings all happened on the same day, but that is certainly not the case. However, it would have been quite something if all these people been together at the same time in the same place and the meetings had not been so random after all.

Michael Foot and Leon Trotsky might have got on quite well together, although the conversation could have become somewhat heated if Willie Whitelaw, a well-known supporter of Margaret Thatcher, had joined in.

Muir and Norden, who had both been in the RAF during the war, would probably have exchanged stories with former Army man Spike Milligan.

“How long were you are in the Army?” Frank might have asked. “Five foot eleven” would have been Spike’s response.

And what about David Hockney? How well would he have fitted in with the other members of this strange assemblage? He would have been the youngest one there by some margin, the only one who was gay and the only one who would have refused to do military service.

However, maybe he would have seized the opportunity to stand back and observe and perhaps he would have saved the observations for a later piece of art. It was not long after my imagined get-together that he developed the technique of making art from joined-together photographs – so perhaps he was standing to one side and imagining a “joiner” of Muir, Norden, Milligan, Whitelaw, Foot and an actor playing Trotsky?

Random meetings can lead to all sorts of consequences, whether real or just in the artist’s or writer’s imagination. Being alive to such imaginings is what counts.

© John Welford