Love & Deadly Nightshade: And Other Stories from Life

By Anthony Whieldon

Twenty three stories, each one a window in time, each one vividly and humorously depicting an episode in one man’s journey through eight decades.

Tony Whieldon is an ordinary person who has led an extraordinary life. After completing an engineering apprenticeship with Rolls Royce Cars and working in their development department, he conducted and drove buses in the family business before taking it over, taught maths at secondary school, farmed in Wales, ran a residential centre for group activities in Devon with his wife, Jean, exported old classical records, mainly to Japan, and practised one-to-one and couples counselling. Nowadays, he sells what remains of his classical record collection on eBay, wonders how on earth he fitted all these diverse activities in, and writes short stories about them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Whieldon
• Release date: Sep 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781956019193

Book preview

Introduction

My earliest memory is of a white surface. The way it slopes makes me think it’s a bedroom ceiling where it follows the roofline, and I can nearly touch it so I’m probably over someone’s shoulder.

Everyone has an earliest memory. I imagine some of them hark right back to that brief interlude between who we are at birth and who we seem to be as the personae we show to the world. And I wonder what happened to our original selves. Are we still here? My interest in such questions, and where they took me, shows up in Slack Tide and Naked Truth, though my day jobs were still things like milking cows and repairing rotten floorboards.

But memory is notoriously unreliable, so in writing these stories I compared notes with people who were there. For instance, I moderated what I said in Candle on The Cake after a contemporary from prep school explained why he loved the place that I all too often hated. Most of the stories are also supported by photographs or documents.

Using the short story form allowed me to cherry-pick those I thought might be interesting and leave out the humdrum, which perhaps gives an impression of a life-on-steroids - but that’s story-telling.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

The candle in my left hand guttered and went out. I must have reacted by tilting the one in my right hand, because molten wax scalded my thumb and I dropped it! The darkness was absolute, as if the very air I breathed had turned black - and the matches were on the shelf at the cave’s entrance some 50 yards back.

I had history with darkness.

When my mother switched my bedroom light off, I would listen to her footsteps receding down the stairs, the click as she turned the landing light off from the two-way switch in the hallway, the ker-klump as she shut the sitting room door behind her. And I’d lie there hardly breathing as the indistinct shapes in my bedroom turned alien, the creaks and tappings from the attic turned threatening.

I knew that if I switched the light back on, the scary chair would turn back into being an ordinary chair; that if I screwed up my courage to open the cupboard door there’d be nothing there but clothes and hangers, and that the sounds from the attic would be just the sounds of an old house. So if I told grown-ups how frightened I was, they’d say there was nothing to be frightened of and I’d feel not understood, which would only make things worse. For how could I explain that my fear was what I felt and had nothing to do with reason?

Sometimes I did switch my light back on. But my father had this thing about wasting electricity. Leaving lights on unnecessarily made him mad. So if I switched it back on I’d lie there listening for the grownups coming to bed. Then I’d jump out of bed and switch it off, knowing it was safe for me to go to sleep now because dark forces only preyed on children when they were alone; they faded into walls, or something like that when adults were around. But switching the light back on brought another problem: I might fall asleep and it would still be on when my parents came to bed. Then Dad would tell me off next morning and I’d have to say I’d got up for a pee and forgot to switch it off.

Eventually I came up with a kind-of solution: I would creep along the landing and sit at the top of the stairs, cold but protected by the murmur of voices from downstairs and the light shining under the sitting room door. I know that seems mental, but it worked; that tenuous connection with light and grown-ups was a lifeline. As soon as the sitting room door opened, light would flood the hallway and I’d be back in bed before my parents even reached the bottom of the stairs.

After two winters of shivering on that top step (I don’t think the problem was the same in summertime when daylight lasted until late), my life changed drastically because I was sent away to boarding school.

Here it is: Smallwood Manor Preparatory School for Boys: an 1886 Grade II listed building with its 64 boys, eight teachers and four domestic staff in front of the main entrance in 1946. I’m seventh from the left, row four. I specially remember Mrs Askey, sitting second from the nurse, and how we lined up along the corridor to the bathroom in our dressing gowns for her to dunk us in cold baths at about five second intervals every morning. (I recently learned that cold baths really do strengthen the immune system!)

Smallwood Manor Prep School

My favourite teacher was Mr Horne, second from the right hand end. But a teacher called Jack, also in this picture, was a paedophile and Moggy Moxon, the headmaster, arms folded in the middle, sacked him on the day a delegation of senior boys screwed up the courage to tell him about Jack.

Moggy replaced my mother in switching the lights off at night, his bonne nuit, bonne nuit, bonne nuit, booming ever closer as he made his way along the corridor to one dormitory after another. Silence was the rule after lights out, with the threat of caning if we broke it. But with no staff upstairs to hear us, we soon had our flashlights out and were chattering away or reading our comics.

And here’s the main thing: Smallwood had its share of spooky corners and things that went bump in the night. But I found that it wasn’t only adults that kept dark forces at bay; any human being would do, including eight-year-old versions. After a few nights in my dormitory, nothing disturbed me but Ian Bramwell talking in his sleep and sounds from Adam Douglas’s bedstead that reminded me of how our fridge back home juddered just before it packed up. So whilst there was plenty to dislike about boarding school in 1946, a big plus for me was that I could go to bed at night without being frightened of the dark.

But back to both candles going out in the cave: I was probably only ten at the time, so what on earth was I doing there all by myself? All I can remember is something like Dad having left his spectacle case on the altar and me volunteering to fetch it, probably to show everyone how fearless I’d become.

If you Google Hagley Hall Cave, you’ll find that Wikipedia calls it a folly under the house, implying it was a kind of cellar or basement. But the house was at the top of the valley and the cave at the bottom with about 100ft separating them, so a domestic connection is implausible. We kids understood it had been made by Druids long ago. I don’t know where that came from but, whatever its origins, the skills and labour needed to excavate deep into solid sandstone using hammer-and-chisels with only primitive lighting must have made it a mammoth task.

Below is a photo of my father at the altar in the cave, taken for an article in the Birmingham Post newspaper. The light of the flashbulb makes it look lurid to me since I’d always seen it in candlelight, in which the sandstone is reddish fawn. (There were plenty of candles to choose from just inside the entrance, but they were all stubs as short as the three in the photo. One of Dad’s economies.)

Dad at the cave altar

Something else that made our cave special for me was the blessed air of tranquility I felt as I entered it. Perhaps this was down to vibes from years of worship associated with that altar. Or perhaps our human DNA harks back to times when we were at home in caves. At any rate, I don’t remember being frightened when those candles went out. What I do remember is an interlude of not being anywhere in a way I’ve never experienced since.

I don’t think it was what is referred to as an out-of-body experience; for that people typically recall things like I was at the ceiling looking down, whereas I wasn’t anywhere - as though I didn’t have a body to be out of.

My best shot at it today is that I might have glimpsed something we are not normally aware of called consciousness without location. The kind of thing, perhaps, that people were hoping to experience when they floated in one of those immersion tanks popular in the 1900s that used salt solutions at body temperature, with silence and pitch darkness so you lost all tactile sensation. I tried one once and did feel disembodied. But, although it reminded me of my cave experience, I remained solidly aware of being in a tank.

I don’t remember getting out of the cave in the dark. I must have edged sideways until I touched the sandstone wall and then felt my way to the door. The door, by the way, was always kept shut by a spring my dad had fitted to keep animals out. He was afraid that if they got in they’d make it stink. As it was, it had wholesome, earthy smell that made you want to breathe deeply.

Nowadays, I like taking our dog out last thing. My senses are sharper than in daylight. When the skies are clear, I’m sometimes spellbound by infinity being up there right where I’m looking yet beyond my comprehension. On nights when it’s really dark, my scalp sometimes prickles because there’s something behind me. I spin round to catch it in the beam of my flashlight… But there’s nothing there, always nothing, and I know my childhood fear just showed up 75 years on. But I can smile now knowing it’s just my imagination.

So what about that moment when the candles went out? Was what I’ve rather grandly called consciousness without location just my imagination too? I don’t know; it’s hard to recall anything with certainty at this distance, let alone something that whacky. But I’ve read that there’s a growing body of scientific opinion proposing that consciousness is universal; that our brains trick us into an illusion that it’s individual and separate. If that’s so, perhaps my moment in the cave was a brush with Reality in a lifetime otherwise ruled by illusion.

Love & Deadly Nightshade

Jim and Hannah Hodgkins were my best friends when I was a small boy. I just knew Hannah loved me because whenever I called at their house she gave me a big slice of cake and a cup of tea with lots of sugar.

Their sitting room smelled of cigarettes, furniture polish and, when it was cold, of coal smoke that puffed out of the fireplace from downdrafts and blackened the red bricks under the mantlepiece. There were loads of interesting things in that room. Things like a brass shell case from the war where they kept walking sticks and umbrellas. A china goose with a child sitting next to it on a green base, and a real kingfisher perched on a real branch under a glass dome.

My only photograph of Jim shows a slightly-built man perhaps in his 40s, though he must have been 50-something by the time I knew him and he looked nearer 70 when he wasn’t wearing his false teeth. He had a terrible cough which my mum said he got from working down a coal mine and from mustard gas in WW1. But the Wild Woodbine cigarettes he smoked couldn’t have helped.

Whenever I called, Jim seemed to be sitting at a table in a shirt with a collar-stud but no collar and an unbuttoned waistcoat, studying Littlewood’s football pools or reading a left-wing newspaper called the Daily Herald. He didn’t go to work so he must have been on a war vet’s pension.

If Hannah showed she loved me with cake and sugar, Jim showed he loved me by taking me fishing. We would put moistened bread kneaded into pellets on our hooks to catch roach, and worms to catch perch and trout. But after Jim told me