- The Rise and Fall of Snowy Garden - A Hoot in the Darkness

By Mervyn Linford

The animals in a children's story rebel against the author and the book concerns itself with the hilarious consequences that inevitably follow such a revolutionary act

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326805494

Book preview

- The Rise and Fall of Snowy Garden - A Hoot in the Darkness

The Rise and Fall of Snowy Garden

or

A Hoot in the Darkness

Mervyn Linford

Littoral Press

First Published in 2016 by:

The Littoral Press, 15 Harwood Place

Lavenham, Suffolk CO10 9SG

© Mervyn Linford 2016

Chapter 1. The Liberation.

Now, Henry the hedgehog just couldn't understand all this anthropomorphic nonsense. He was happy as he was; prickus-prickus was good enough for him. Why that man on the typewriter should feel the need to equip him with gloves, scarf and a cheese-cutter, was totally beyond his comprehension. Nevertheless, being an obliging sort of hedgehog, he decided to comply with the author's wishes. If human-beings preferred to believe in the all-singing, all-dancing, variety of hedgehog, then who was he to destroy their illusions?

It was a snowy morning in early January, By rights, Henry should have been fast asleep in the leafy world of hibernation, but things being as they are, he found himself dressed to distraction and up to his snout in freezing whiteness. The garden was deep in metaphors, a wonderland of cold confectionery. Henry, struggled through drift after drift, trying his hardest to appear amused. Now, Henry wasn't stupid, he just wasn't used to the aftermath of a blizzard. Water to him was something fluid, so when he found his favourite tipple as stiff as a discus by an empty saucer, you can understand his animal confusion. Undaunted, he took to scratching about beneath the rhododendrons, believing the shelter they afforded to be the ideal habitat for winter worms. No such luck, the three he found had all the taste and consistency of six-inch nails!

It was about then that great dollops of snow started to fall from the trees above him. On looking up he saw the sleek form of Simon the squirrel.

Good morning Simon, he said, Nice day for alliteration.

You must be joking, answered Simon. Is that pratt of an author still writing stories out of season?

'Fraid so, said Henry, shaking the snow from his frozen prickles.

Now, you may have noticed a certain bourgeois tendency on the part of the author when it came to the naming of his characters. Henry and Simon were used to this by now, in fact they were secretly pleased with this upgrading of their status. But their radical friend, Oliver Owl, was above all such pretensions.

Whooooooo the bloody hell d'you think yooou are, he hooted, as he fell to the ground in an avalanche of irritation. You're nothing more than common or garden animals, he  continued. You'd best leave the pathetic fallacy to Whinnie the Poooooh and those poets of a pantheistic persuasion.

Henry and Simon, having grown accustomed to outbursts of occasional militancy, just shrugged their shoulders and exchanged a couple of knowing glances.

I've had enough of this, bemoaned Oliver. Every bloody winter's the same. Is he some sort of snow freak? Has he never heard of mild weather? Why can't he send us on a Spanish holiday?

Oliver had a point, what is it with children's authors, why do they always subject their animals to the rigours of an arctic climate? It may well look pretty in the illustrations, but it's not much fun under fur and feather!

Well, the time had come to fight back. Oliver, wise as he undoubtedly was, decided to re-educate the proletariat. At the bottom of the garden stood a tumble-down shed, covered with snow and ivy, or whatever else took the author's fancy. This, thought Oliver, would be the ideal place to carry

out the processes of indoctrination. Simon and Henry, though somewhat wary, girded their creaturely equivalent of loins and followed the pedant to his seat of knowledge. Inside the shed, Terrence the tortoise, shuffled about in a box of straw.

Morning brothers, he hissed. Nice day for a revolution.

Bit chilly, said Henry, always the one for small talk.

Oliver pretended to ignore the wisecracks, determined to invest the occasion with the seriousness that it deserved. Oliver began his dissertation.

The first thing to remember is that we all have rights. The laissez-faire interpretation of society, as shown by the perpetrators of children's stories, is without doubt the major cause of our alienated condition.

Bravo! cheered Henry, rising to the pitch of perfect oratory.

To continue, said Oliver, puffed up and fearless with his new-found pride. The oppressive attitudes of the literary classes are symptomatic of all that's wrong with a capitalist environment. We, the characters, in symbolic form, are manipulated to such an extent that we lose all affinity with our true natures.

Up the workers, blurted Simon, brim to the pouches on pickled walnuts.

Oliver wiped his wing across the cracked and frosted window-pane. Outside the snow was falling heavily. The garden was a white-out. Individual flakes were virtually indistinguishable. A continuous swirl of enveloping crystal shrouded the vision with uncanny light. Distances, diminished and dissolved, as earth and sky fused like the fibres in a frame of paper. In the branches of a pear tree, Percy the partridge and peregrine pigeon, were hunched against impossible plosives.

There you are, said Oliver. This is what we've come to. We allow ourselves to be taken in by bourgeois propaganda, and what do we get?

Pickled walnuts?" queried Simon.

No, you blue-brained rodent! screamed Oliver. Impossible plosives, that's what we get, impossible plosives!

Henry, himself more used to gutturals than other forms of onomatopoeia, grunted in agreement. Terrence, on the edge of sibilance, questioned the