Two Fables: The Crow and the Can-Opener & the Boars of Boars' Hill

By Alison Armstrong

These stories are the result of imagination stimulated by lessons learned from various creatures, both wild and tame, who understand the immutable and eternal laws of the Natural world and in whom justice and truth are innate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796092578

Alison Armstrong

Alison Armstrong is a writer of prose and plays. She grew up in Leeds and East Yorkshire and has worked as a cleaner, waitress, painter and teacher, as well as developing her writing career. She won a Northern Writers’ Award for short fiction in 2017, a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and a Project Grant from Arts Council England in 2021. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published in magazines and journals. She now makes her home in Lancashire, and Fossils is her first book. 

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Copyright © 2020 by Alison Armstrong.

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.

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

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/11/2020

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INTRODUCTION

                            Birds, bees, butterflies…nests,

                            holes, trees, lakes, hives, hills,

                            shores, and hollows…nearly every

                            creation shares some version of

                            this deep attachment to a place in

                            which life has been known to flour-

                            ish, the kind of place we call home.

—Shoshana Zuboff

F ABLES REVEAL THE foibles of human nature and have provided humorous wisdom, since the time of Aristophanes’ The Frogs , if not before. Two of my earliest exposures to animal stories were powerfully affective: the films Fantasia and Bambi . And while they were shown in our town in the 1940s, and my father was off in the jungles of CBI photographing the beauties of the villages a well as the ravages of the war for the Army Air Corps, my mother was in charge of my development telling stories of her girlhood at the farm. An uncle gave me the Rudyard Kipling book about Mowgli of the jungle. And Grandpa Armstrong, who loved horses, made sure I read the Kipling story told by the polo pony in India, The Maltese Cat.

But one of the first books I tried to read at about age two was The Little Red Hen that showed colored drawings of the nouns, such as Hen; in retrospect this method of storybook may be seen as a precursor to today’s e-moji. And then in the 1950s there were the comic books about the Mickey Mouse family and the Donald Duck family. And cartoons from the Disney studios that came on with the Pathé News films before the main attraction at the movie house. But more importantly, these two stories of mine are indirectly, that is unconsciously, derived from a lifetime of reading (or having been read to) essential books with exquisitely appropriate illustrations, including Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll (a nom de plume) illustrated by Tenniel, the Bre’r Rabbit stories of Uncle Remus (also a nom de plume), the Peter Rabbit stories of Beatrix Potter, the Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham, Walk Kelly’s Pogo, and later on in college in the 1970s, I delighted in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parlement of Fowles and the tale of Chaunticlere and Pertelote in which the devoted pair outwit the red dog.

This long immersion in animal stories has combined with intermittent but deeply felt years of country living—a late summer and autumn in Wales (then Gwent, between Monmouth and Abergavenny with my young son in a cottage named Pen pwll-y-Calch near Offa’s Dyke owned by mother’s college friend Edythe who took in walkers), then to North Oxford, where my son went to middle school and soon to Boars Hill and various country residences (damp overgrown Meriden Bungalow, then to Miss Jackson’s Foxcombe Cottage with her two Steinway grand pianos and the many birds that fed from her outstretched arm, then to Miss Hubler, who taught me about not washing mushrooms and making sorrel soup, with