Gibbous Moon

By Michael Bannister

I have led an interesting and happy life over the past sixty-odd years.
When I die, hopefully not just yet, I don’t want my memories and experiences to disappear with my mortal soul, wherever it may go, so I started writing them down for my children to endure at some later date.
At first it was just to capture a long-lost time of endless summer walks in the Yorkshire countryside but, as I focused more on the events in my early years, the memories came flooding back.
I wanted the tale to ring true to my experiences, so It is set in the place of my birth, Yorkshire, England, where my family have lived for many years and I grew up in a household just like the Bannerman's.
I remembered how, as a young teenager, my grandfather’s death had left an indelible scar on my being which still hurts to this day, but is mostly hidden away among the hurly burly of daily life.
I remembered my first loves and encounters with folk not from my usual cosseted environment.
And I remembered how it all seemed so normal then, not having experienced anything else in my young life.
It is only now, with the advantage of hindsight and many more years behind me, I realise what a magical and unique young life it was.
In this novel, I have used my experiences to fashion the story into, what I hope is, a believable tale.
None of the people in this story actually existed, but are a composite of the many wonderful, and not so wonderful,
folk I have met on my journey through life.
So, without further ado, on with the tale, and in the words of Mark Twain,
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Bannister
• Release date: Jul 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452349336

Michael Bannister

Michael Bannister was born in Yorkshire in 1953. He is married with three children and lives in Milton Keynes. Whilst studying biochemistry at college, he developed an allergic reaction to the chemicals used and was forced to leave before completing his degree. After three years in the jewellery trade followed by a year in the petro-chemical industry he moved into IT in 1975 and is now a retired IT Management Consultant and Radio Presenter/Producer.

Book preview

Gibbous Moon

Michael Bannister

Published by Michael Bannister at Smashwords

Copyright 2019 Michael Bannister

CHAPTER 1 – GRANDAD

Thud!

Grandad's head hit the floor with a thud.

Go and sort him out, Michael. Grandma's request was met with compliance.

That's the third time this week Grandma!

I aimed the statement into thin air and bounded up the stairs to Grandad's aid. Opening the door, the aroma of moth balls and vomit invaded my nostrils with the determination of a dog in heat. Grandad was prostrate on the floor, covers wrapped around him in a failed attempt to imitate an Egyptian mummy. Helping him back into bed his new weight of six and a half stone was much easier to handle than his fifteen and a half stone would have been some six months earlier.

He muttered something in my ear and was then sick on my best school shirt.

Oh God, Grandad, Mother will kill me! Can't you aim it in the bucket like I've shown you?

He looked at me with sorrowful, apologetic eyes then spewed on my best school trousers.

Securing him to the bed, I made my way back down the stairs to the kitchen. The smell of bread and dripping Grandma had prepared for supper permeated the air. Bread and dripping was Grandad's staple diet and it only occurred to me many years later that bad food choice had probably caused his bowel cancer, but at the tender age of seventeen these dietary thoughts had never crossed my mind.

After supper, there was nothing on television, so I went to bed to read my Patrick Moore, Observer book of Astronomy. Grandad always said that my head was in the stars and bought the book for my fourteenth birthday.

He wasn't sick then.

I poked my head round the door to check on him before I turned in. He was sleeping like a baby, except he was a bluey colour and not the normal pink you associate with babies.

My eyes grew heavy as they tired of Magellanic meteor showers and my thoughts turned to the morning.

I woke at four am with a start as the front door slammed shut with the report of a ten barrel shot gun. Grandad had gone to the newsagents again. Forty years of working down the mine, night after night, shift after shift, had left a Pavlovian imprint on his mind that even a terminal illness could not remove.

He had to go and get his morning paper.

By the time I achieved a decent level of attire and reached the front door he was gone like a ferret up a drain pipe, his mind somehow bypassing his physical affliction.

This wasn't a new trick of his. Since the 1950's, when his skull was shattered by a stray half ton lump of coal, he had performed this early morning promenade three or four times a week. Gradually the occurrences lessened to once or twice a year. His recent illness and increasing dependence on pain killing drugs however had somehow reawakened this primeval urge.

I eventually caught up with him and with the skill of the captain of the QE2 brought him about and we set a course for home.

Putting him back in bed with a copy of yesterday's paper, he was soon sleeping like the proverbial. Snuggling down to now luke warm sheets, my dreams soon returned and I found myself in a room, talking in a strange tongue with men who were changing into bears.

My mother had suggested a few months earlier that living at Grandma's might be useful for me and Grandma as well. It wouldn't have to be ALL the time, visits home occasionally were acceptable, but I could have more time to myself to study and help Grandma now that Grandad had been taken ill. My three brothers, David, Paul and Mark, also thought this a great idea as now they would have a single and double bed to split between three and not four.

David was the least pleased. Three years my junior he would now become the head brother and thus blamed for every misdemeanor that was perpetrated in the brothers’ name. Plus the fact that, with only two players, our nightly farting competition wouldn't be quite the same. Mark never joined in as he tended to sleep in the single bed and as a five year old hadn't really grasped the rules of the game. Paul could play but lacked the bowel control to release the fart on demand, unlike David and myself who were masters of the art. And so it was with my 'Gola' bag, transistor radio, and World War One binoculars that I moved to Grandma's house on a part-time basis.

What do you want for breakfast, Michael?

Grandma always woke me with these wonderful words.

Egg, bacon, tomatoes and fried bread! Was my reply in anticipation.

Growing lads need their food and more than that they need a good breakfast. Grandma was a wise old buzzard.

The school bus arrived five minutes late as usual and I sat at the front to avoid the back seat mob. They would often pick on a poor unfortunate, taunt and bully him, throw stale food at him and tie him to the seat with his own anorak toggles. Everyone used to laugh at him, but not me.

It was me.

Thankfully this bus journey through hell would be over in 10 minutes. I often wondered what would happen if the bus broke down on route. Give those bullies ten more minutes, a rope and a tree or a can of petrol and the results might be quite different. Mercifully that never happened.

Percy Grantham Grammar School, my school. A school founded in the 1930's and frozen in time. Built in an era when 'mods and rockers' were bits you found on a car and the teaching profession was regarded as the 'noble art', it had changed little; little that is until the sixth form of 1970 met head on with 'Adolph Atherfield' the new head.

The school governors had had enough of this new breed of sixth former. Cocky, petulant, rude, obnoxious just like any teenager in fact, but in the classrooms of Percy Grantham, frozen in pre-war mediocrity, this breed was to be crushed into submission. They (the Governors) could not use napalm, germ warfare, blitzkrieg, but they could use 'Adolph!’

Adolph, real name Arthur, was a cockney made good, the worst kind. Brought up in the 'East End' he became the youngest headmaster (28) of Brixton Comprehensive and transformed the school from an anarchic, depraved centre of decadence to the 'model of educational excellence', Adolph's words not mine.

Morning assembly, normally filled with the sound of 'Morning has Broken' or 'Jerusalem!' under the old partite was now Adolph's soap box, his own 'Hype' Park Corner.

We heard it all. Stabbing, rape, glue sniffing and that was just in his study! The old school tie he spoke about was in fact an old car tyre set alight with the aid of petrol and placed around a teacher's neck. Almost every day in his 'old school' some deranged pupil attempted to take Adolph's life. We soon began to understand why.

Adolph was bald as a badger. Nothing wrong in that, except he was very proud of his baldness and proclaimed ad nausea (they did teach me some Latin, marvellous thing education) that he still had all of his hair; it was in a box in his bedroom! The upper sixth, in a moment of madness, decided en masse to send Adolph a wig, not just any old wig but the bright ginger wig that older gentlemen seem to wear regardless of the colour of the remaining strands of hair that they possess.

The wig was never mentioned but the inhumane act that was to follow one week after he received the wig was to devastate the population of the school. Hairocide was declared! Every pupil was to be inspected; with head erect and chin in parallel to the ground if any hair was to touch the collar, instant suspension from educational activities would ensue. Other sub clauses of this heinous act were just as bad. Sideburns must not extend beyond the top fixature of the ear. Beards and moustaches, for those that could grow them, and I'm sure he included some of the girls in this, must be removed daily.

The world was never the same again.

Everyone in the school, male and female, were either mods and rockers or hippies and flower people in the making. How could we maintain our credibility in the outside community with hair of a non-descript length? Long hair was the visible symbol that separated us from them. If we allowed this to happen we had lost the battle and the war.

The decision to fight on was taken.

Kaiser and Norbert caught up with me after dinner break but before the start of afternoon French with Miss Charmley.

Banny! Everyone called me 'Banny' or 'Mick' except my mother and grandma who would insist on calling me Michael.

Banny!! Kaiser repeated menacingly.

He was a frightening character with his jet black unruly hair, stubble and acne only a mother could love.

The sound of his voice could down a first former at 40 yards but his main claim to fame was drinking out of the same polystyrene cup as Marc Bolan, his hero (but only while he stays acoustic).

Banny. You going to Charlie's Saturday?

Charlie, the head boy, was having a party on Saturday and we had been 'booked' to do a 'gig'. Kaiser, Norbert and I were the founder (and only) members of the folk/rock band 'Toad Fallout', a strange combination of twelve string Jumbo, mouthorgan and East African Talking drums.

Going? Wild horses couldn't keep me away.

I really was looking forward to Charlie's. I might get a chance to chat up Amber, I'd been eyeing her up for weeks at school but sober could never conjure up enough courage to ask her out. Charlie's was my chance.

Norbert was my best friend and confidant and understood only too well my excitement at the mention of Charlie's name.

Think you'll snog Amber then?

He had such a way with words.

Yea, s'pose so, I answered confidently.

Bet you don't.

If Norbert had been born a sheep the farmer would have had him put down. He was a sort of runtish, stooping individual, with a slightly deformed hand but a brain as sharp as a butcher's knife. Someone once said of him that if ‘wit were shit he'd have diarrhoea’.

Bet you fifty pence that I do, I replied recklessly throwing monetary caution to the wind as well as my weekly allowance.

Where did you get fifty pence from? Norbert was surprised when I exhibited such sudden wealth. He knew that my family would often visit church mice to ask them for a loan.

Never you mind, my lad, I retorted putting on a phony Somerset accent that I often did in times of stress. I think in a previous existence I must have been a clergyman based in Frome who had dedicated his life to celibacy; in fact my penis still thinks I have!

As I ran off down the covered way towards my French lesson I heard Kaiser mention something about giving someone a good ducking. I didn't realise Charlie had a swimming pool.

Miss Charmley's legs grew longer during each forty minute period or her skirt grew shorter, I could never make out which. How I passed French 'o' level I shall never know. How any male pupil in her class passed French 'o' level I shall never know, apart from Nigel Parsons that is.

Do you know any French at all, Bannerman? She would often ask me this question. Unfortunately, she used to ask me in French so I didn't have a clue what she was saying. Thankfully no one else in the form understood a word either and it was with great regret that Miss Charnley left Percy Grantham's to be replaced by Mr Blander. And he was. Very.

I had never heard the French language spoken with a Yorkshire accent before Mr Blander arrived and I have never heard one since. His favourite pastime was not to teach us French but to tell us about his exploits just after the Second World War traversing France on a 'bicyclette'. He was particularly fond of the anecdote concerning the farmer's daughter amongst the apple trees and I am convinced that the only formal French training he had was via this