Tiddlers in a Jam Jar: A Walkabout Across the Longitudes & Other Strange Encounters

By Brian Priest

This book is an Aladdin’s cave of treasure for the reader who enjoys writing that engages the senses as well as one’s appreciation of great writing. The author’s humour and wit are dry and subtle. Each sentence is a polished visual gem, drawing the reader into the events unfolding or the situation described. His style is succinct, the whole flows in a lyrical way, carrying the reader smoothly along on a never-ending river of images. For me, the imagery evoked in just a few sentences is something I have hardly ever found. What makes it even more enjoyable is that the creation of the imagery is somehow effortless.
I absolutely adored this book. Fiona Ingram – Multi-award winning author.
Tiddlers in a Jam Jar is a delightful blend of adventure, travel memoir and literary non-fiction. Brian’s story begins in wartime Britain when his world exploded into flames and flying debris with blackness on the windows of houses. He tottered, war-damaged, on purple-cold legs his nose-dribble rounds of a hospital, and dreamt away treadmill school years, to globe-trot on a 50-year odyssey of dangerous and hilarious encounters. To greet a foreign dawn rising into day and feel the thrill of teetering on the unknown. The author has led an unconventional path through life, lost in jungles in search of Mayan ruins, face to face with mountain lions, riding the Hippie Trail and sailing an Asian sea of fleeing refugees

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Priest
• Release date: Aug 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9780473444105

Book preview

Tiddlers in a Jam Jar

A walkabout across the latitudes

& other strange encounters

Brian E. Priest

ILIAD PUBLISHING SERVICES

Copyright © Brian E. Priest 2019

All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means without prior written permission except for brief excerpts in book reviews.

ISBN 978-0-473-44408-2

eBook formats:

ePub 978-0-473-44409-9

Mobi 978-0-473-44410-5

This book details the author’s personal experiences. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual places, events and incidents is purely intentional. When providence presents such extraordinary characters and experiences, there’s no need to make up stuff.

Contents

Bombed but not bowed

Empty spaces in the mind

Tiddlers in a jam jar

An exquisite boy with a ginger wig

Melting tones of the Pacific

A sex-obsessed Dickens

Standing in for the Beatles

The river of lanterns

A boxcar to Palenque

Maggie, the flower child

Venus de Milo’s apple

Cheap wine and paella

The Hippie Trail

Bromide in my tea

Simone’s silky angel wings

Double deckers & bowler hats

Casting off with a bang

The flying priest of Camiguin

Tiger pie & mushy peas

Where the cows sleep at night

The Grande Dame of Levuka

An encounter of remarkable coincidence

Bombed but not bowed

Emerging from the rubble. Violin concerto in a bomb shelter. A taste of beige. Skin art laid bare in a wartime hospital.

FRIDAY, THE DAY OF MY BIRTH, was not hugely eventful but it did mark the completion of four giant presidential heads carved out of the granite rock face of Mount Rushmore begun fourteen years earlier. The following Wednesday Admiral Yamamoto ordered the attack on Pearl Harbour and managed to poke awake the ‘sleeping dragon’, unwittingly setting in motion the decimation of his homeland.

It was the sound of the klaxon in town blaring out four mournful howls to stir fire-fighters from their beds which jiggled a twitching chord of memory from those way-back times. The eerie warning still sends a quiver down my spine. A chill reminder of sirens wailing against the sky as the Luftwaffe droned overhead in a war-torn Britain.

I try to empty the words out of my head to fill blank pages with these events before they evaporate like smoke from a campfire rising into the mist. But they are only as your memories make them; sometimes unreliable with the frustration of advancing years. To cut and paste fading memories from old photographs into the time-line of our life and sometimes shape them to fit the story. It is all we have after all. When we remember something we reconstruct the event and reassemble it from scraps of recollections in our heads. A carousel of flashing images stirring whispers of each sound and thought.

My earliest wrung out memory was as a mere tot, witnessing the world breaking apart and exploding into flames and flying debris from a bulls-eye bomb-dive on several houses nearby. The horrors of a world at war were distinctive enough to have lodged in my mind for three-quarters of a century.

A fog of choking dust filled the streets as air raid sirens wailed against a menacing sky. The despair of this operatic doom would later spill over into the Cold War years with their threat of nuclear extinction as the Iron Curtain was about to descend with a clang across Europe to cast even more gloom on a populace battered but never bowed.

On a moonless night the streets were dark as rows upon rows of houses with blackness on their windows hid splinters of light from enemy planes 20,000 feet above. I was perambulated through darkened alleys as German bombers let loose their carnage. Oblivious to the drone of sirens and rainless thunder, my mother calmly pushed toddler and pram inhaling the rubbery pongs of a child- fright gas mask to visit relatives long since scattered to the sanctuary of a bomb shelter. Walt Disney designed a Mickey Mouse gas mask for children to make them less frightening. Children never got to wear them. Playgrounds of kids in Mickey gas masks was not to be. The government didn’t think Walt took the war seriously enough.

The ‘horse-headed’ apparition of my mother emerged through the haze to squint through goggle-eyed orbs the smouldering rubble in a street no longer familiar. We were discovered hours later walking in confuddled circles by a warden and taken to the canteen at a Rest Centre in a building still standing with its windows still intact. A blackened kettle steamed away on the hob for a strong brew of rationed tea.

My mother’s courage, or foolhardiness perhaps, was typical. In her silvered years with similar quietude she sat in a bank waiting to draw her pension. Balaclavared robbers rushed into the building brandishing weapons. Much put out she hoisted herself onto sore feet and slowly creaked on two new knees to weave amidst bladder-weakened customers to the exit. The robbers stared open-mouthed as she walked out the door to a bank nearby. She complained to the startled tellers that her bank was busy being robbed and she would like to have her pension thank you very much.

The two-up, two-down terrace house stood brick solid amidst a row of decaying teeth perched high on a cobblestone street in the ancient and landlocked city of Leicester, famous for its station clocks and Richard III’s kingly bones. It is also where Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame, David Attenborough, and Engelbert Humperdinck hailed from.

Our home-sweet-home haven was a Victorian knee-jerk to the industrial revolution; an ugly legacy of nineteenth century cheap housing and substandard living. Black-curtained windows intensified the pit gloom leaking into its coal-smoked rooms. On a windy day when a draught murmured in the chimney, powdery clouds of soot belched over the flagstone floor leaving prints of feet blackened by dust meandering throughout the house in a snail-trail of filmy slag.

Damp crept aggressively to loosen florid wallpaper from musty walls in the two small bedrooms above. There was no runningwater or a bathroom. Instead, awater jug and basin for washing sat atop a small stand. Their companion, a rose-flowered chamber pot, peeked shyly from beneath bedsprings. It was too arduous to heed the call of nature and traipse cross-legged down to the outhouse privy in the cold boonies of the backyard, and then quickly return to a chilled bed to inhale its stale dankness.

The nearest telephone sat in a bright red booth several streets away with neighbours waiting patiently with coins jingling in their pockets to make a call. The phone boxes could also receive them with their very own call numbers. I would answer the phone if I happened to be passing and asked to knock on the door of Number 29 and say Gladys was on the phone.

Strung out along the mantelpiece perched a sepia record of photographs in a darkened parlour reserved for visitors too important to sit at the kitchen table. It revealed a passing glimpse into a pallid world of grainy images where be-whiskered men and dour-faced women, ramrod stiff in a starburst of magnesium, stared po-faced from their wooden frames. This hallowed front room, mostly unused, was an affectation left over from the Victorian age. Nowadays the term is used for funeral and massage parlours.

A more recent photograph showed my mother smiling with a bat-eared son. Ears taped back to lessen wind resistance. This static image was set apart from the spectres of those immortalised in their monochrome world. Photographs can only offer a frozen moment of a life; the actual split second of an image captured and retained only through the lens of the camera, rather than remembering it as it really happened. The image is re- created every time we think of it.

And yet I remember vividly that treasured flicker in time staring gap-toothed in my Sunday glad rags as the photographer took aim. A blinding flash and the shutter clicked to capture that unique moment.

Looking into the steadfast gaze of those dusty portraits, I recalled eagerly the snippets of family tales passed down from generations. It was like stitching together a tenuous thread of Chinese whispers of hearsay, with small ripples of recognition, a little added here and a little there for modest embellishment.

The dim gitty, the entry from the street with lattice above the door to let in shards of light, led to our pocket-sized yard on the left and that of our neighbour on the right. I don’t remember ever seeing a door key. Homes were left unlocked in an era of trust, with parcels from the uniformed postman left on the kitchen table if no one was home. Sometimes a note with a copper penny or two left for him to collect a letter which he would post for you.

The corrugated dome of an Anderson shelter sat half buried in the yard. Its roof covered in soil from its excavation to soften the blows from falling bombs and to grow rhubarb and cabbages. In the days shortening into winter, it became a cold damp hole in the ground where rainwater seeped through earthen walls to collect in puddles at our feet. The shelter was shared with our neighbour, an elderly man with an oriental droop of mustache stained yellow by a chain-smoke of cigarettes. He cycled for miles through the clamour of air raid warnings to find illicit tobacco lurking in the back streets of a black market.

As a distraction during an alert our neighbour, with a violin caressed under a stubbled chin, played classical music. And belt out an Irish jig for a bit of a shindig if the cramped bunker had allowed.

Fleeing homeward out of harm’s way from a falling sky did little to diminish the anxiety of wartime dread. There appeared the sleepless frightenings on nights lingering until the dawn reprieve. I peeked out warily from beneath blankets at dark-shrouded figures surrounding my bed in pin-drop silence. Their ghostly features hidden within the cavern of their shrouded hoods, watching, just watching. I prayed nightly never to die. Not ever. The dim shadows of the scary dream slipped away into another daybreak. The first of mysterious glimpses into another world, or maybe their little peek into mine.

The toilet was a shabby brick lean-to. Draughty and cobweb-laced where I sat amongst the spiders and learned to read. My library consisted of old newspaper squares tacked to the whitewashed wall with a rusty nail. These dusty words were read first then bottom-wiped until the next lesson.

With no running hot water, the laundry bubbled in a copper tub in the wash-house over a blaze of coal every Monday. Clothes were scrubbed on a washboard, corrugated to guarantee premature wear and blue-rinsed and roller-mangled to dazzling spotlessness. A tin tub hung on a nail waiting for the weekly bath. A low-tide ration of water was allowed to bathe in; the cleanest first, the grubbiest last, and dried off with bath towels cut in two for austerity. And then to finally toast oneself in the warmth of the kitchen coal-fire with a cup of lip-scalding cocoa and a potato biscuit.

Sack-covered men begrimed in coal dust, their eyes peering lucent white from swarthy faces, shouldered heavy bags to the coal shed. Their large mottled grey horse could be heard clattering its massive hooves, feather legged on the cobblestones outside, impatient for the warmth of his stable next to the blacksmith, and champing at the bit to dip his head into a nose-bag of oats. Down at the blacksmith’s shop I watched in fascination the horses raise their large shaggy hoofs to be shod.

Long rehearsed queues of mothers with babies joined at the hip and their brood clinging to skirts, snaked around welfare clinics for orange juice, vitamin tablets, and cod liver oil, a dollop of gnat’s piss slurped from a communal spoon followed with orange juice to lighten the faces of children crinkled with revulsion. Housewives joined the queues with parade-ground precision regardless of what was on offer and stood patiently for hours come rain or shine, sleet or snow. It was a national pastime and an opportunity to suck in the ill wind of local gossip. Their treasure then lugged homeward on Shanks’s pony (local slang for hoofing it) with no refrigerator to preserve it for a hungry day. This rite of passage was repeated daily during the long fourteen years of rationing.

We listened for the clackety-clack of a horse and cart heard streets away delivering milk to our doorsteps. Manure plopped in steaming piles in the cart’s wake to fertilize cabbages and cauliflowers in carefully tended backyards. I was often sent out into the street with a bucket and shovel in a mad scramble with neighbours to be first to scoop up the precious poo.

In a culture of ‘make-do-and-mend’, old clothes were never discarded but darned, patched and repaired. Everything was old or broken with little hope of being replaced. We lived under a cloak of respectability, conformity and polite restraint in a disconcerting and yet heart-felt sense of community where neighbours knew more about your business than you did yourself.

Feeding an animal food that could be eaten by humans was a serious offence. To give a cat a saucer of milk risked imprisonment. Fined for feeding birds with bread long since stale, our elderly neighbour argued that his poor teeth or whatever remained of them were incapable of chewing it. Mass hysteria led to the senseless massacre of 750,000 cats and dogs in one week. Sacrificed on the false assumption by the government that putting down the family pet was a patriotic and humane thing to do, and later much regretted. Distressed pets were cast out of their homes to roam blacked-out streets and alleyways with many of them tied up in sacks and thrown into canals. A sudden multiplication in the population of rats and mice as a result caused even more distress.

The ration-bleak years had their upside with protein and vitamins for the poor and less flab food for the affluent unless it was hustled from the back streets of black marketeers. My appetite for the first thirteen years of my life was gauntly shaped by rationing. With junk food not yet invented, an energetic devotion to gardening produced vegetables by the cartload. A dietician’s dream half a century later. Horse meat, dried eggs and the ‘national loaf ’, a grey, mushy tasteless slab of wheatmeal, made up the fare until Americans introduced a canned pork and potato starch product with a high content of fat, sodium and preservatives. It was called spam.

Communal kitchens called ‘British Restaurants’ were available where diarist, Frances Partridge, described meals as all beige: ‘Starting with beige soup thickened to the consistency of paste, followed by beige mince full of lumps garnished with beige beans and beige potatoes, and topped off with thin beige apple stew.’ I grew up alarmingly bean-pole tall and skinny-shanked.

However, austerity was overlooked for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding in 1947. A four-tiered cake, swaying three metres high and weighing 225 kilograms, materialized from the royal kitchens. Dressed in their finery, over two thousand guests turned up for this lavish bash to enjoy top-notch cuisine in a ‘ration-free’ zone. Red meat, caviar, anchovies, parmesan and exotic fruit were available to the travelled, educated and rich throughout most of the war. They also dined at non-rationed chic restaurants when appetites beckoned.

Hysteria rode on the tide of war. An aunt in Coventry, forty kilometres away, told of women screaming and trembling uncontrollably to swoon away in a dead faint in the streets. The impact of night-tide bombing on those terrifying nights caused perpetual fear and an overwhelming desperation of utter helplessness and heart- sink despair. Two and a half million copies of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters printed by the government were never distributed.

This powerful aphrodisiac of danger encouraged a ‘live-for-the-moment’ mindset. People drank more alcohol and sexual desire was blatantly intensified during air strikes. Beetroot-stained lips and stockingless legs, seams pencil-lined, were applied for exploding nights of fear and pleasure. Many believed they wouldn’t survive the next onslaught. Husbands and wives two-timed in the adrenalizing spell of danger and erotic freedom. However, no amount of cannons or bombs could shatter the ‘blitz spirit’. Shaking a defiant fist at Jerries overhead, dauntless women raised families single-handedly, ran factories, drove ambulances and built vehicles while their men were away at war.

The American soldiers’ smart uniforms and odd ways appealed to the local women. Credulous girls and wives of absent soldiers fluttered around the flame of these flamboyant, well-meaning Americans, lured by cigarettes and nylons in a nation heavily rationed. And in their wake, a trail of