Burning Bush Stony Ground

By J. L. Fiol

This collection is the final in the series Burning Bush Stony Ground. As in the case of the other four volumes, the stories have previously appeared scattered among the pages of Troubled Water, When It Was the War, The Devil in French, Second Coming, and The View from Below.

In the Burning Bush Stony Ground series, the stories have undergone changes in shaping, content, sequence, or point of entry. Some appear under different titles.

All the stories in the series, with the obvious exception of those with celestial, infernal, and futuristic themes, have personal connections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524631987

J. L. Fiol

N/A

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© 2016 J. L. Fiol. All rights reserved.

Interior Graphics/Art Credit: J. L. Fiol

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/18/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-3197-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-3198-7 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Contents

Foreword

The Whirring of the Moths

The Path Along Perversity

At Odds or Just Odd

As Others See You

Isambard Kingdom at Your Service

O Little Tower of Babel

No Speaky Please, We're Breeteesh

Nazism and the Locked Knee

Elspeth Newall's Column

Editor's Notice

Can I Be Chemist

The Agony of Cyril Ashpole

Oops

The Royal Visit

You Didn't ... I Did

Life at the Blunt Edge

What is One to Do?

Pass the Violin

It's as it is

Notable Exceptions

Lost in Translation

My Prostate Revisited

The View from Below

Onward Christian Soldiers

Divine Intervention

The Wake from Hirohito

Little Splashes

A Spray of Jasmine

Whithersoever Thou Shall Go

Postscript

Foreword

This collection is the final in the series Burning Bush Stony Ground. As in the case of the other four volumes, the stories have previously appeared scattered among the pages of Troubled Water, When it was the War, The Devil in French, Second Coming and The View from Below.

In the Burning Bush Stony Ground series, the stories have undergone changes in shaping, content, sequence or point of entry. Some appear under different titles.

All the stories in the series, with the obvious exception of those with celestial, infernal and futuristic themes, have personal connections.

J.L.F.

Cornwall 2016

4.%20Image%20A.jpg

To the memory of Do:

child-woman, barefoot walker in the dew,

twin to the Morning Star, returned to Stardust.

The Whirring of the Moths

One of my several fictitious fathers was fond of saying that butterflies are the thoughts of the soul. The Reverend Aleister Stoker, known to his nearest and dearest as Aleister the Impaler, was a collector of butterflies. He could go into near-swooning ecstasies in evoking the fragile beauty of the insects and, almost in the same breath, embark on graphic detailing of the procedure by which the thorax of a specimen is punctured with the retaining pin to grace his collection.

If I were to draw parallels between the thoughts of my own soul and lepidoptera in relation to putting together my stories, I would have to settle for stubby moths.

When the notion of putting pen to paper presented itself, unannounced and totally unexpectedly, I was thrown into something like a tail spin. Ideas came to me, usually around three in the morning, with all the insistence and aggravation of a moth trapped in the bedroom after lights out: whirring and bumping into objects in the dark, disturbing slumber and activating the bladder.

As a pedlar in images, I have the greatest of respect for ideas in whatever form they appear. They are rare commodities and not readily available when needed. They are, however, capricious guests with no regard for possible inconvenience about the time of calling, added to which they are easily slighted if not accorded due hospitality and may not call again.

It is therefore imperative that whatever the time and circumstances of calling, the idea is given palpable form in however brief or sketchy a fashion: be it in the form of key words or phrases or rough drawings. The ideas come from the same place as dreams and there is no guarantee of recall with the passing of time.

So. Here I am, debating whether or not to get out of bed and go in search of pencil and paper. I am reluctant to do so on two counts. Primarily, I am loathe to disturb my wife. She is going through a difficult time health-wise and has great need for the respite in sleep. Also I am not a little embarrassed by the pressing urge to write things down, since for all I know it may well be one of those aberrations which seem to overtake men in particular at a certain time of life. The argument is settled by the bladder and I resolve to get up. It is then that the pantomime starts.

Silence and lack of discernible movement are of the essence. My wife is blessed with such hearing as to be able to register the dropping of a pin before the moment of impact. The slightest displacement of bedcovers or variation on the indentation of the mattress will bring a reaction. An extended arm will search my side of the bed. If it detects bulk it will retract to repose mode. If however the issue becomes one of Habeas Corpus, the sleeper will sit up in alarmed wakefulness, perhaps imagining the absentee to be lying prone on the floor of the bedroom in the grip of some nocturnal seizure: a surmise which disregarding the state of proneness would have bearing on the truth.

By infinitesimal degrees, starting with the lifting of my head from the pillow, I achieve standing posture by the bedside. The sequence rarely takes much more than half an hour. I then proceed bathroom-wise, my tread on the accommodating bedroom carpet timed in keeping with the exhalation in the sleeper's breathing rhythm.

The token dribble effected, it is time to venture across the landing, booby-trapped with creaking floorboards, past the bedroom and onto my little room. If by misfortune the traverse across the landing registers on the Sonar, I have the expedient of claiming to have been disorientated and taken the wrong turning back to the bedroom from the bathroom.

Entering my little room, the main hazards come from my swivel chair and the discarded slippers on the floor. Those surmounted, I can settle to the work in hand, which is to pluck key words or phrases from the whirring that in the sober light of day can be enlarged to coherent form.

Given that I have to operate in pitch black, I rely on a system not unlike Braille. The first objective is to identify and select a pencil, noiselessly, from the collection of assorted pens, ruler, set square, Stanley knife, scalpel, bulldog clips, rubber bands, paper clips, double-sided tape, stapler, scissors and pliers on my desk. Then follows a groping search for the window sill, from there to select a sheet from the pile of scrap paper. Thus equipped, with one ear attuned to the whirring and the other to the bedroom, I can begin.

The actual notation is rather a hit-and-miss affair. In the darkness the writing hand needs to be guided to the paper by the other hand. As jotting ensues, the writing hand needs to constantly be made aware of the confines of the sheet of paper if making notes on the surface of the desk is to be avoided.

At peak periods as many as five stealthy trips across the landing are undertaken before the whirring stops. In an effort at being provident, I sometimes keep pencil and paper to hand at the bedside. It is the signal for Sod's Law to come into operation: the moths don't come. Just once they came. On the occasion, she-who-hears-all interprets my scribbling as the possible presence of mice in the bedroom. Needless to say I am unable to confirm the suspicion when interrogated whilst in a profound sleep.

With the passing of time, I am able to distinguish between two types of whirring by the pitch. The high-pitched type requires the traversing of the landing. The other is more low-key and less strident. It alerts to alterations to work already in draft form. For such whirrings I have a less demanding strategy. It involves the handkerchief which I keep under my pillow being tied in a knot and laid down in a conspicuous place on the floor by my side of the bed. It acts as an aide-memoire. Coming upon it in the morning, I am reminded of its message.

The arrangement works well provided the two types of whirring are not received in the one night. The danger being that in replying to the strident type, one's bare feet come in contact with the knotted handkerchief. Caught off-guard and in a semi-wakeful state, one might vent an uncalled-for expletive and in justification be forced to feign a vicious attack of cramp.

If the night, or rather what's left of the allotted period for sleep passes without undue incidence, one can sleep the sleep of the Just. The moths released, go to their mysterious trysts with the moon or on clouded nights, seek solace in street lighting.

The Path Along Perversity

My nearest and dearest tell me that I have a perverse nature. It is no longer said accusingly, more in weary resignation and, I rather suspect, not without a little proprietorial indulgence.

I am also told that my so-called humour is of the basest kind: that it rests entirely on sarcasm and comes at somebody's expense. I always refute the indictment, in part, by pointing out that I do include myself among those 'somebodies'.

It is one thing to be perverse just for the sake of it, quite another to have a genuinely perverse take on the guidelines set down for the attainment of conformity. The latter, if it manages to just fall short of the bizarre, can lead to some interesting places on the other side of prudence. It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. If so, perversity can make reasonable claim to being its grandmother.

In order to avoid any misunderstanding at the outset, it needs to be made clear that the adjective 'perverse', although deriving from the same Latin root (vertere: to turn) as the noun 'pervert' does not carry the connotation of deviancy associated with the latter.

We hear of perversity in relation to inanimate objects, as in the case of the slice of bread with jam always landing gooey side down when dropped. In actual fact that is a popular misconception and not a case of perversity. In landing jammy side down the bread conforms to a Law in physics which determines that the heavier of the two sides of the slice heads the trajectory: to wit the jammed side, which although marginally so, in this instance is significantly and therefore crucially heavier than the bereft side.

I can almost hear the snorts of derision from pedants at pains to point out that relative weight is irrelevant in relation to falling objects. No doubt some will cite the case of the ancient Sage who dropped a cannonball and a feather simultaneously from a high tower. The Sage would have been sage indeed if able to conjure up a vacuum in which the two disparate objects touched ground simultaneously. In the absence of a vacuum, I could go some way in support of the imagined pedant if the feather was attached to a large bird and the Sage lobbed, say an ostrich, over the parapet along with the cannonball.

Pursuing the instance of perversity in the context of dropping, we come up against the anomaly presented by Felis domesticus, known as the domestic cat. It is a fact based on observation that when dropped from any reasonable height, a cat will always land on all fours. It does so in contravention of the Law touched upon, which requires that the cat lands on its back by virtue of the fact that the back constitutes the greatest bulk of its anatomy and therefore the heaviest. It is of course the extraordinary feline agility of Felis which enables it to adjust the approach to landing.

It is not a facility at the disposal of other dropped animate objects, notably in the young of Homo Sapiens. In that example, the disproportionally large head will lead the descent towards impact in due conformity with the Law in operation. I am bound to add the disturbing thought that the incidences involving babies are more frequent than might be supposed, judging by how often one hears references to someone or other having been dropped on its head as a baby.

When quite young I gave consideration to the possibility of me being among those dropped and made enquiry regarding the probability of my parents. It is not something one is normally inclined to ask one's parents, but I was prompted so to do after catching snatches of conversation among my extended family when discussing my behaviour. My parents were strangely reticent on the subject.

What if I had been dropped? What if instead of the standard head impact, I had made my début in perversity by landing four square on two feet? I could not help but wonder if it might have thrown some light on the question uppermost in my mind at the time: namely, why in the name of all that is blessed was I shorter than the majority of my fellows? Surely landing on one's feet would severely impact on the spine. In so doing, the cushions between the vertebrae would be constricted, thus compromising growth.

I had already discounted the stunting effect of starting smoking at an early age, a view prevalent among the school-bound at the time. I did not smoke then or ever at any time. Anyway, Alfredo Canepa was living proof of the fallacy in that belief. He was six foot three at fourteen and had smoked like a chimney stack since the age of seven. It was ironic that he ended up looking like one. I also had concerns about my habit of sleeping in a tight foetal posture when told that saplings need to stretch to grow straight.

As a devout Catholic lad, I also went along the spiritual route. Failing to find a Patron Saint for the Altitude-challenged, I sought the intercession of St Jude, Patron Saint of Lost Causes. All to no avail, with the final nail in the coffin hammered in when I read in the Good Book about Man not being able to add a cubit to his height. There was no mention of it applying to boys, but by then my disillusion with the whole of Western Christianity was total.

For a time a branch of Eastern Philosophy advocating mind over matter appeared to hold possibilities. An Indian school chum had invested in a mail order course on Pranayana: Fulfilment through Breathing. He himself was keen on developing his hypnotic powers with the ultimate view of bending the wills of Western girls. I asked to borrow the course after he suffered a severe setback when he attempted to exercise his power over a female member of his extended family. My interest centred on the section on Levitation with its facility for hovering several inches above ground at critical times.

The introduction to the course exhorted the devotee not to attempt any of the exercises before undergoing a test of latent powers. To that end a white card with a black spot, some three inches in diameter painted black, was provided. One was required to stare fixedly without blinking at the centre of the spot for a full two minutes. If at the end of that period a golden rim appeared round the edges of the black spot, it would signal the suitability of the devotee to embark along the path to enlightenment. I submitted to the indoor eclipse and with the coming of the Corona felt elated enough to ignore the stinging in my eyes. I was some way along the path with the exercises which followed when my hopes were cruelly crushed. My grandmother dumped the course in the bin because it made the house reek of curry.

I finally scraped the barrel of my aspirations with an advertisement I came across in The Wizard or The Hotspur, although it might have been in Tit-Bits. It was next to the advert by Charles Atlas and his body-building course using Dynamic Tension. His slogan was: don't be a seven-stone weakling and have sand kicked in your face on the beach. That was not a danger I was exposed to since I seldom ventured on to the beach.

The advert which caught my eye proclaimed: Be Tall, be Popular. I wasn't too gone on the Popular bit, but I was prepared to make sacrifices in order to