Khaki Malarkey: And the Purple Privates

By Don Chivers

Rodney Yurkovitch, son of a mismatched marriage between a Roman gypsy on the lamb, and the overweight daughter of a taciturn English farmer with six irate, huge, and healthy sons. Rodney, the result of Zekiras wandering bliss, is enticed from his innocent hog farm secreted in Yak, Canada, to be a businessman and drive a Rolls Royce for his victimized uncle; Rodney whos an undertaker with two old Rolls Royce hearses. He becomes a British citizen in time to be conscripted into Hitler's war.

Being extremely large and gormless with an accent that captured part of Romany, he fumbles his way through battle with his one aptitude at being a crack-shot poacher, which he learned from his neer-do-well Poppa. He inadvertently creates a misconception of possessing a brain. The aura of a hero is constantly leading those around to suspect that this massive Canuck with something of a Canadian accent as having some hidden depth even to the extent of having the top generals of the three services bargaining for his contribution to compete in their different services.

The exposure of his true worth is irrevocable and comes at an unexpected moment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499052626

Don Chivers

Donald Chivers grew up in Cardiff South Wales, and now lives in White Rock B.C. He is a veteran of the Burma Campaign, and has written many books under different pseudonyms. His book "Prorogatio" gives details of his early life.

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Copyright © 2014 by Don Chivers.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014914038

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4990-5260-2

                Softcover         978-1-4990-5261-9

                eBook              978-1-4990-5262-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover by Richard Chivers

Rev. date: 08/082014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 A Place for Birth, right?

Chapter 2 Becoming an Executive

Chapter 3 Compensations

Chapter 4 The Joys of life

Chapter 5 The psychiatrist

Chapter 6 The Authorities

Chapter 7 Train ride to nowhere

Chapter 8 Genuine Purgatory

Chapter 9 Social Climbing

Chapter 10 Hell’s bells and Action Stations

Chapter 11 Bombay

Chapter 12The Strategist

Chapter 13 Onward for golf

Chapter 14 A Refreshing Change of Circumstance

Chapter 15 Futuristic Financial Concerns

Chapter 16 Exposure

PREFACE

T HIS LITTLE COMEDY takes you back to the 1940’s, when victory over Germany hadn’t yet made Churchill a great man. He remained a slightly chubby fellow with a bowler hat, giving dire warnings of what was to come; fighting on the beaches and all that.

The miseries of the entire world had not yet been brought into our living rooms by T.V, and so our worries were confined to the weather being pleasant, or not so pleasant, or whether Jack would get that job or continue being a blight on the landscape.

Sex and dancing seemed to play a greater part in our lifestyle. Half the world was undeveloped, and the other half a lot happier in ignorant bliss of a yet devastating future. I wrote this book as a respite from the horrors of today’s world.

INTRODUCTION

Z EKIRA YURKOVITCH, WAS a lonely citizen of the Hungarian backwoods. He was a diminutive gypsy with little bald crown above sad brown eyes in a round clown-like face with a nose resembling a badly sculptured lump of putty. His wispy black beard wound around his skinny neck to join an awry of unkempt skimpy hair.

A series of recent mishaps had left him in dire straits. His broken caravan lay sideways in a deep ditch, while his old horse had been taken by law into the care of a kindly society. With roaming discontinued, poaching became very restricted with land owners being able to point the finger. Zekira was now known to the police. It seemed every skinny rabbit led him into the local constabulary. He felt that Mother Nature had truly turned her back on him.

He obtained temporary work as a gardener on the wealthy Borgura Estate; not that he had any knowledge of gardening. He was picking his nose without a thought in his head when the wildly flapping curtains that billowed out from the open French doors attracted his attention. He was merely entering. There was no breaking or anything like that. Perhaps he was just thinking of closing the doors. What-ever, he was already inside, but not before swiveling his head around to see if the coast was clear.

The two beautiful silver candlestick holders that adorned the grand piano was a temptation that couldn’t be denied. Someone was smiling down at him. They were just standing there, unattended, waiting for him. It might be ‘lifting’ but definitely not ‘breaking and entering’ he thought rather reasonably.

Zekira had never been a thief, at least never a successful one, but he was always ready to improve himself. His imagination was the master of his emotions. He could buy a new horse to replace old Boisy. He could again take to the free and wandering life. He really wasn’t cut out for a life of toil. The closing of a distant door galvanized a hasty retreat back through the open doors. He rushed across the lawn approximating the four-minute mile, impulsively stuffing the loot under his tattered coat.

Clutching his middle he ran headlong, candlesticks protruding left and right. Frantic thought always followed impulsive action. Now this was definitely theft! Were they real silver? What would he do with them? He would die in prison!

After weeks of hiding he was still convinced he was one step ahead of a relentless bounty hunter, he crossed the Dover Straits to England in a leaky fishing boat that coincidentally cost him the exact worth of the candlesticks. It was in the year 1917 when manpower on English farms had been exhausted by the demands of war. Zekira, posing as a refugee, applied for and obtained work as a farm laborer on the Benson farm in South Kent.

A year later, following the 1918 armistice, when all the men folk were returning home to their wives, Zekira performed a deed that changed his entire life. It happened immediately following the sucking of a straw after sleeping away an afternoon up in the hayloft. Molly Benson came in with a jug of beer as was her practice. He showed her a rare phenomenon; a work blister as proof that he hadn’t slept the whole day, and if it had stopped there, this book would have never been written. But on receiving an inordinate amount of sympathy kissing it better and all that, Zekira felt encouraged to go a step further and put her in the family way.

Molly Benson was not a person to be victimized by any stretch of the imagination. The rotundity of her rear-end, when covered in a black skirt, was practically interchangeable with that of an overweight hippopotamus. At two hundred and fifty-eight pounds, she was in fact a little over twice Zekira’s weight, but every ounce kindled exciting thoughts and intriguing possibilities for the amorous little suitor.

The secondary appeal was her wide, toothy smile with a center gap that, when under pressure, produced a piercing whistle to stampede the sheep and bring in the hogs. An added bonus was the unique and efficient manner in which Molly could sift her mother’s split-pea soup. Zekira was captivated by all he saw. He saw amazing talents.

However, Molly’s seven brawny, over-protective brothers returning home from France with all their fingers and toes, jubilant and still feisty after their victory, was an entirely different matter, and posed something of a disincentive to the unlikely union. They habitually referred to Molly as their little sister, and treated Zekira much as they did Zeke, their sheep dog.

Zekira and Molly spent two months alternating between his peppercorn cottage, hayricks, hedges, and the back of Mr. Benson’s milk van, experiencing uninhibited and euphoric sexual abandon. After missing the monthly event, it became apparent to Molly that Zekira, being the male of the species, was somewhat responsible for her condition. Surely he should therefore overcome all social barriers and venture across the field to inform her truculent and sometimes violent father of his undying love for his little princess.

Molly expected her father’s forgiveness even though he’d long since given up bouncing her on his knee, and now walked with a pronounced limp. Molly insisted that the confrontation should take place on the morrow, during the family’s evening meal. She calculated that her father was in his most benign mood when sitting down to eat, and being an ever hopeful optimist, she speculated that Zekira having the hots for her was an occasion for celebration. Zekira must therefore accept the inevitable invitation to stay for dinner after receiving his blessing.

Mr. Benson was an extra large and taciturn man with huge overgrowth of black eyebrows. He was embittered by time and the fact that the war had left him bereft of his farm help; help that had taken many years of enthusiastic persistence in fathering and training seven brawny sons. There was Rodney, John, Eric, Joe, Alvin, Robert and James. He tolerated Hungarian gypsies only when his patriotic sons were away being heroes in France, and if it hadn’t been for his wife’s sense of humanity, Zekira would be sleeping with the dog in the barn if not abandoned to utter destitionion, instead of occupying a perfectly rentable, but tiny unheated, thatched cottage at the other end of the copse.

When Zekira approached the worn and weathered front door of the farmhouse he was fully aware that he was about to tweak the beard of the lion and perhaps be torn asunder, but he didn’t really think the impending interview would result in actual death. He was somewhat reassured by Molly’s axiom that love always found a way. Thus foolishly convinced, he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and knocked on the door.

Martha Benson, an older replica of Molly, let him in, and showed him through to where the family sat at a long heavily laden table, gulping down pea and pig’s-trotter soup. Zekira was not a religious man. In fact he was a man with little or no convictions of any sort, but images of the Last Supper, his last supper, kept him alert and aware of the location of the door.

Molly looked up and smiled her encouragement, her face splitting in two over a row of clogged green pegs that had recently been siphoning soup. Still harboring feelings of painful inferiority and doubt, Zekira removed his cap and shuffled to a vantage point not too far into the room. They should have known what was coming by the way he screwed up his cap, not discounting the sound of his knees knocking like a pair of clappers. He experienced a morbid foreboding that he was before a hostile tribunal. His little brown eyes widened and glistened with the weight of his carefully thought out disclosure. Everyone paused, stopped slurping in simultaneous accord, and turned in expectant silence.

Molly an me is having a baby, he blurted without sentiment, forgetting to say they were in love, or any of the other rehearsed niceties.

The male component of the Benson clan rose to their feet as one, amid a clatter of scraping chairs. (Martha was left sitting with her mouth open.) Eight threatening giants encircled Zekira within a heady odor of pickled onions and Gorgonzola, completely shutting out the light from the little oil lamp in the corner of the room. Their general demeanor was one of unmitigated displeasure, amounting to an antagonism mingled with astonished chagrin.

Zekira’s sensitive antenna became tuned to the detection of possible rejection, born out by the waving of closed fists, the grinding of teeth, and the number of four letter words.

The three largest, led by Rodney, who was obviously teetering on the brink of mayhem, were about to drag him out to the old oak tree, when suddenly the house shook to its very foundations. It was Molly leaping to her feet like an elephantine witch about to cast a doomsday spell. She directed her anger with great personal accuracy, pointing wrathfully at each of her troublesome kin. I love him, she screamed, dribbling with rage, eyes bugging and skin flaming down into the abyss that was her cleavage. So you bloody well back off, the lot of you.

This sudden volatility was a revelation to an unsuspected side of a hitherto usual placid and even jolly persona. Her trembling thighs pushed the heavy table aside spilling half empty soup bowls as if it was all a trivial obstacle to her future happiness. It caused everyone, including Zekira, a moment of acute apprehension. Having eclipsed the threat that came from the seething seven, not to mention the wrath of the Benson master himself, she pounced over and took Zekira’s hand. Come, my love, she said. Join us in some pig’s trotters soup.

They sat alone, tentatively stirring their remnants of soup while Zekira’s future became irrevocably written in stone. With sudden insight, he knew that his days of impulsive and opportunistic forays into the world of chance, would henceforth be somewhat directed, if not entirely curtailed.

The brotherhood moved some distance away from the cowering little man, and went into a huddle around ma and pa Benson, their incredulous voices raised in angry perplexity. Under the newly revealed circumstances, hanging the wretch seemed definitely out! Zekira had a fleeting thought of saying he was only joking, but fortunately verbal paralysis prevented him from being killed by Molly. Going up to that front door had been the only occasion in his entire life that Zekira had made a decision that wasn’t along the path of least resistance. At that stage he didn’t really know why he’d acted so imprudently, but was now acutely aware that henceforth he would be under too close a surveillance from the whole Benson clan to contemplate delayed flight. He sat before his cold soup, deeply regretting his foolish display of bravado.

However, the recurring longing to be ensconced between Molly’s massive hot thighs kept him on the straight and narrow path to matrimony far more effectively than her hot-blooded brothers, or the waiting shotgun over the mantelpiece. Also, the knowledge that Molly was in his corner with something more than a towel, was to some extent reassuring, and did much to calm his terror of being a very temporary inconvenience to the Benson clan.

They were married in the nearby country church with Molly wearing a white billowing gown made out of two parachutes, one slightly yellow with age.

The peppercorn cottage was not the starting off abode that they had both hoped for, and for a short time they lived under strained tolerance in the small attic of the farmhouse, which involved fleas