The Raggedy Tiger

By Mark Roland Langdale

In a lovely manor house in West Sussex, living with her parents and grandparents, exists a girl named Tiger. Tiger is autistic and thinks differently to everyone else and didn’t in fact speak until she was seven, but she is a talented painter and adores tigers (and in fact all animals). Although the manor house is her entire world, her imagination opens everything up so she can even believe she can see the Taj Mahal from her attic bedroom window. Her parents love her – even though they wish she might draw on paper rather than the walls! – but even so, Tiger spends a lot of her days alone in the house and in the garden. And it’s there where Tiger’s world will change forever…

One night, she paints a raggedy-looking tiger onto an old red brick garden wall. Under the blue moon, the tiger comes shockingly to life. Immediately bonded, Tiger knows in her soul she has found her first friend and willingly abandons her normal life for an adventure of the wild kind!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805146148

Mark Roland Langdale

Mark Roland Langdale has had a varied life and career. He has worked with children and teenagers, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in an effort to fundraise, travelled down the Amazon and is a longtime member of Greenpeace. Mark likes to write modern day fairytales with an undercurrent of real life issues such as mental health, environment, dyslexia which he suffers from himself, and autism.

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Contents

The Spirit Lives On

Prologue

The Spirit Lives On

I lost a friend a while ago, and with her the sun, the moon, the snow – at least that’s how it felt, you know.

Of course you know because, like me, you have a million memories, of times we laughed, of times we smiled. I really thought of you as a real wild child.

Back in the days of endless Indian summers and scorching hot Mays I heard it through the grapevine by Marvin Gaye.

They say the spirit never dies. I imagine you as a butterfly.

Your flight of fancy has not come to an end, because the spirit lives on, my dear, dear friend.

Mark Roland Langdale

A wild imagination can be both a blessing and a curse, although most of the time it tends to be a combination of the two, like you cannot have the light without the dark, the sun without the moon, the tiger without the tale. And this is as far-fetched a tiger’s tale as has ever been written, or so I would imagine, and by the end of this fantastical tale I hope you will be imagining exactly the same thing.

It is indeed a rare thing for storyteller and reader to be on exactly the same page all of the time, and if they are I would suggest that tale does not stretch the imagination of the reader as it should. I imagine it may help the reader to imagine the storyteller as a tiger and the reader as a tiger rider. The tiger will lead the tiger rider around the tiger maze, up and down raggedy pathways to blind alleys and dead ends until tiger and rider reach the goal, the heart of the tiger maze. Having taken a well-earned rest, the tiger rider must then remount their tiger and continue until they find their way out of the maze.

It is only then, after some contemplation, will the tiger rider fully understand the journey they have been on. Each tiger rider will experience the journey differently and will come to their own conclusions as to what really happened: what was fact and what was far-fetched fiction. I hope you enjoy the tiger maze. It took me some time to design it to my own unique specifications. It is a most unusual maze which undoubtedly will not be everybody’s cup of tea.

I would say one last thing: tea should be savoured, not rushed, for it is a most magical elixir – not surprising given the fact it cannot be made without the magical elixir of life that is water.

I hope this tiger’s tale does not disappoint. A dreamer should never put a glass ceiling on their hopes and dreams or their imagination. If there is some mystical mythical secret place beyond the imagination perhaps one day it will be you who is the first to find it.

The storyteller, Mark Roland Langdale

Prologue

The story starts simply enough – no signs of the twist in the tiger’s tale (tail) that is to come. A young child was daydreaming her school holidays away in a walled sunken garden in the country. This was not a secret garden, although it did have a gate. However, this was not a gate that could be locked, for this unusual gate was an Oriental moon gate. The sunken garden would have a secret to keep or to tell, but that was for the future, not this present moment in time, which for this child was the most magical of times.

Time is a magical thing more precious than gold according to the Chinese, and they should know for they are the keepers and protectors of a most magical and fantastical beast, the tiger. When in a magical moment time does appear to stand still it certainly does whenever you are lucky enough to come across a tiger in the wild. Sunken and red-brick-walled gardens, like attics, are indeed magical spaces, and in the case of the sunken garden, nature’s very own Aladdin’s caves.

Painted upon one of the garden walls of the sunken garden, like the lions found in ancient caves many, many moons ago, was a tiger. The question was, how long would such a magnificent beast be able to stand still, for tigers are restless animals, especially when caged, or like cats on a hot tin roof. The Painted Tiger, like old country villages and hamlets, was trapped in time, it would never grow old, or so the artist imagined.

The artist of this natural work of art had brought this creature to life using the cylindrical magic lantern in her head, and in reality making a flicker book of it. The artist who created the Painted Tiger had been born with a gift: a gift for art and a gift for seeing what others could not see. As bright as the eyes of any tiger wandering through a dark forest at night, it was no small wonder that it appeared to be written many moons ago, quite possibly in the stars, that this child was to be named Tiger.

Although the girl in our tiger’s tale was fluent in tiger speak, or tiger talk, she did not utter a word until she was seven. This inability to make herself understood to those around her frustrated Tiger, however she had no problem communicating with animals. It was as if the words inside the child’s mind were like an old tiger trapped in a cage for years, one that was too afraid to come out of the safety of that cage. At times Tiger felt like a caged tiger, the only difference was her cage was one made of glass. Alternatively Tiger had reimagined the cage as one made of moonstone, said by the Romans to be a magical substance, especially in its purest form. It was the moonlight that eventually unlocked the door of the cage in Tiger’s mind allowing the words to flow out of her head like quicksilver, as if from a mercury fountain in a paradise garden in Persia.

Tiger may not have been able to paint pictures with words in the metaphorical sense of the word but she was able to paint pictures using words. Now, to most people’s mind that last sentence does not entirely make sense, unless your mind works differently to that of those around you.

One day, Tiger’s parents noticed their daughter had painted a tiger on her bedroom wall in the attic. It was only then upon closer inspection of the tiger they were able to see what a special and gifted child she was. You see, Tiger had constructed the tiger from one word, the word ‘tiger’.

Oh, one more thing: to put you in the picture, Tiger was what some folk call ‘special’, somewhere on the spectrum. This was a spectrum Tiger imagined was somewhere over the rainbow so far off the spectrum it was, in fact, over the moonbow, or the giant Oriental moon bridge made of moonstone as Tiger had reimagined this giant, unseen, magical arch that once again could only be seen by those with great vision.

1

The Painted Tiger

‘We should really get Tiger to paint on paper or canvas rather than everything else but paper and canvas. I swear if she could climb a ladder and paint the moon she would,’ Mr Moon sighed shaking his head, wondering how his sparky child would find her place in this mad, mad, mad world.

‘Yes, I wish she wouldn’t paint tigers all over the house. I feel like I’m inside a giant cage in a zoo full of nothing but tigers!’ laughed Mrs Moon, as both she and her husband saw the funny side of a special and gifted child who saw the world through different eyes to other folk, in this case through the eye of the tiger.

Mr and Mrs Moon continued to set about putting their daughter’s small world to rights, not realising their conversation was being listened in to by a giant – a giant white elephant. Two facts everybody knows about elephants are: one, they never forget, and two, they have exceptionally big ears. The white elephant in the story was an Indian elephant, thus its ears were not as big as the ears of an African elephant. In truth (which as we all know has very little place in a children’s wonder tale and the same could be said about facts), the giant in question was, in fact, a ramshackle Edwardian house backing onto the South Downs in West Sussex, known as Aylton Manor.

Aylton Manor was an old country mansion that had twenty acres of land attached to it. There was even a small wood in the grounds through which ran a Roman road once upon an ancient time. The manor house was a bit like an indoor maze having over a hundred rooms in it as well as a cellar and an attic. To a child’s mind attics, like sunken gardens and woods, are magical places, and although most attics are by and large tiny spaces compared to houses, woods and gardens, they are magical places where a child can easily get lost.

Yes, what could be more perfect than an old house in the country with grounds large enough for a child’s imagination to run wild? And for this girl her imagination most certainly did run wild. So wild, was it any wonder sometimes she imagined she was a tiger in the wild? Perhaps the fact the girl in our storybook was an only child was another reason she built a world of her own and why she only spoke to animals, some wild, some domesticated and some that came from the nearby farm.

It was hard to penetrate Tiger’s world of many wonders. It was as if she really was living behind a wall of glass or was trapped in a giant glass paperweight. Tiger lived in a small world, so it seemed right and proper, despite the size of the large manor house, that she felt most comfortable in her small attic bedroom at the top of the house. From her bedroom window in the attic Tiger could see not only as far as the eye can see but as far as the imagination can see. This keen eye of the tiger meant Tiger could see the Taj Mahal from her bedroom window, and what a sight that was to wake up to every morning. It was certainly no small wonder, and the same could be said of the imagination.

Another of Tiger’s homes inside homes was the drawing room, which, understandably, she had reimagined as an art room or small art house. Tiger had adorned the walls of the drawing room with elaborately painted tigers and elephants. Her parents said it was as if she were trying to recreate her imagined home, India, for Tiger, unlike her Indian grandparents, was born in England.

Tiger’s surname was Moon. I know, you couldn’t make it up. Tiger Moon. It sounds like a name out of a storybook. Surely with such a magical name it was only a matter of time before something magical happened to this moon child. Some of the locals, on hearing the child’s unusual name, were given to thinking she was brought up by hippies and wondered further if the big Edwardian house she was living in was, in fact, a hippy commune.

It was true the Moon family owned the whole of the house, which Tiger had often imagined had been built on the moon. The manor house was split into three separate quarters, three being the magic number. Mr Moon’s English parents moved into the West Wing, naturally, being from the West, and Mrs Moon’s Indian parents, the Singhs, moved into the East Wing. Mr and Mrs Moon lived in the appropriately named Middle House.

It was in the Middle House the three families often got together to watch Indian Bollywood movies as the house went through another magical transformation, this time turning into a movie house. As is the custom in Indian movie houses the audience brings their dinner, lunch and tea with them, spreading it out upon the floor as if they imagine they are attending a giant picnic on the lawn of a country estate in England. In this way Tiger got a taste of India as well as a taste of how the English aristocracy had lived many moons ago before, like the British Empire, it folded like a house of cards.

Mr and Mrs Moon were caught between two cultures: Indian traditions and the eccentricity that comes with being English in the modern world. This being the case, Mr Moon was happy to add Singh to the family name and thus the couple became Mr and Mrs Moon-Singh.

Tiger Moon-Singh. You could not get a more poetical name than that, and as Grandfather Moon often said: ‘You will never catch a tiger howling at the moon, but under a magical moon rolled in white gold, if the gods are shining down upon you, you may find a tiger singing to the Moon Goddess.’

Tiger was often caught between her Indian grandparents speaking one form of Indian language or another, or sometimes a hybrid of English and an Indian language which the Punjab community in England spoke, and her English grandparents talking plain old-fashioned English. Unfortunately Tiger was only fluent in tiger talk, a little-known language only spoken by those who see the world through the eye of the tiger.

‘Father’s forever painting himself, as is Grandfather painting himself into a corner, and one of these not so fine days it will be a corner he cannot get out of, or so Grandmother says,’ giggled Tiger covering her face with her hand in case her father and grandfather were close by, for they were both proud men and not ones who took kindly to being made fun of. These were the words Tiger wanted to use in her defence when her mother found her covered in paint from head to toe. However, try as she might the words only stayed inside her head.

2

The Garden Tea Party

It was early summer and Mr and Mrs Moon were holding an Edwardian-style garden party and tea dance on their lawn, large enough to hold a street party, or so the vicar had said with a smile on his face. This crescent moon smile lit up the rather overcast skies as he sipped slowly from a porcelain cup elaborately decorated with tigers and crescent moons. ‘Lovely tea. Indian, I take it?’

‘Yes, grown from our own vines in the gardens. They were planted many, many moons ago from a plant in India. My great-grandfather was a tea planter who worked in Darjeeling, the tea capital of the world. We still have an old, faded postcard he sent to his family in Rajasthan featuring the famous toy train which takes tourists up from the plains into the mountains so they can view Mount Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world,’ replied Mrs Moon, clearly proud of her family tree and more than happy to talk about the family’s colourful past. After all, India is one of the most colourful, vibrant countries in the world.

Tiger had imagined the family tree as a tea tree on which grew giant tea leaves, and if one wanted to read the tea leaves then they would have had to have a giant tea cup. If there was a storm brewing then this tea cup would have to be large enough for a tiger and a girl named Tiger to get into and sail away.

The vicar was a jolly sort who had the effect of cheering up those poor souls who were under the weather. Jolly by name and jolly by nature, for the vicar’s surname really was Jolly, a name he lived up to admirably. Tiger was one of the few children in the village who looked forward to his sermons on a Sunday morning.

To Tiger’s mind the vicar was holding a storyteller’s circle in the church, his small audience spellbound by his unique reworking of tales from the Bible. The vicar’s gift for storytelling unlocked the illuminated three-dimensional bible in Tiger’s head as one after the other colourful images popped up as if by the magic of a magic lantern.

And it wasn’t just a jolly vicar lighting up the garden trying to match the riot of colour in the flowerbeds. Mrs Moon-Singh and Tiger were wearing brightly coloured saris, glittering with heavy silver anklets and circular golden nose ornaments. Mrs Moon and her mother sparkled in the golden light of a midsummer’s day. Wearing a long orange tunic Grandfather Singh took centre stage and upon his head sat a bulky pink turban as if he imagined he were a maharaja. The only thing missing from the garden stage was an elephant. When the house was first built on the side of a hill in Edwardian times some of the locals labelled it a white elephant, for it seemed out of place in its surroundings of small country cottages.

Grandfather Singh was born and raised in Rajasthan in India, where this colourful outfit was very much the norm. However, in an English country garden the Moon and Singh families rather stood out like sore thumbs. The spinster, local gossip and busybody Miss Flowers could be seen standing on the edge of the garden sporting a pair of large sunglasses. Not known for wearing sunglasses, Miss Flowers was heard to say she was forced to don a pair otherwise she was more than likely to have been blinded by such lurid colours. Now, with a surname like Flowers one imagine Miss Flowers loved brightly coloured things. Those of an imaginative mind may have pictured Miss Flowers in the garden as a flower of one kind of another, although as she was anything but kind, most would not imagine this magical metamorphosis from human to plant.

Miss Flowers was the sort of person who only ever saw things in black and white. She lived in the past and appeared to be happy living there. In fact, by the way she spoke one could easily have imagined this was a time when the British Empire still ruled the roost in India. Given the fact everybody was dressed in Edwardian clothes apart from Tiger, her mother and grandparents this was understandable.

‘I think your mother belongs to every society under the sun and moon, which includes the Lunar Society to which great luminaries and scientists belonged back in the times of the Georgians and Edwardians. Their meetings were always held when a full moon was out and the members were known as lunaticks,’ laughed Mr Moon winking theatrically in Tiger’s direction as Tiger did her best to wink back. However, she only managed to screw her face up as if the sun were shining directly into her eyes.

It seemed to Tiger as if the garden party and tea dance had been stage-scripted and all the characters written. It was as if the garden was an outdoor amphitheatre. Alternatively many of the characters were so jolly, one might say the life and soul of the party, it was as if they were simply one-dimensional characters out of a children’s book written many moons ago in a more innocent time. Hardly one-dimensional characters as this variety of characters were not, as they say, larger than life, they were as large as life. Variety is indeed the spice of life and variety shows are once again taking centre stage like they did in the good old, bad old days.

One could easily imagine this to be the time of the Edwardians before the First World War. This was a time when everybody jollied everybody else along. It was as if the Edwardian clairvoyants, having gazed into a crystal ball, had seen what was coming – another war. So was it any wonder the Edwardians were all determined to have a jolly good time come hell or high water?

Being the life and soul of the garden party and a man who could spice up any drab village affair, Mr Singh, Tiger’s grandfather, acted as if he were an ex-variety performer, a magician in his eyes. It was his wife, Mrs Singh, however, who had the magic touch as far as the women of the village were concerned. Known as the Mistress of Spices, Mrs Singh was able to spice up any drab dinner party with an endless variety of Indian dishes. Infused with magical spices Mrs Singh’s dishes had the effect of transporting the diner to India no sooner had the food entered their mouth. Tiger imagined her grandmother was an alchemist, and why wouldn’t she believe this after the stories her grandfather had spun her on his spinning wheel in the attic about her grandmother’s gift and tales of the magic of Indian alchemy?

Standing beside a row of trestle tables were members of Aylton Bonfire Society tasting various teas Mr and Mrs Moon had prepared earlier from the vines grown in the grounds of Aylton Manor. In truth, there was a lot of spitting going on, normally frowned upon by the Village Green Society it has to be said, although as this was a tea-tasting session it was quite within the rules of the garden party and tea dance.

Tea, according to Mr and Mrs Moon, is the elixir of life, which should be savoured and not slurped or swigged as if out of a jug of moonshine.

‘I sprinkle a little magic over the vines and hey presto, I think you’ll agree Moon Tea has a most magical quality to it that makes you feel as if you can fly to the moon and back,’ Mr Moon beamed producing a black tea caddy with red, black and gold dragons painted upon it. He then took out a small oval-shaped silver spoon and scooped up the tea leaves. Mr Moon then poured the tea leaves onto the palm of his hand, after which he sprinkled them upon the vines that were a stone’s throw away from the trestle tables. Mr Moon was playing the part of the perfect host to a T as Mrs Moon played the perfect hostess.

Anybody with eyes could see the Moons were a great team. Mr Moon was yang to Mrs Moon’s yin – half a black moon, half a white moon as in the Oriental yin and yang symbol. Rose Petal Tea was one of Mrs Moon’s favourites, however Moon Tea still came out on top every time, although Tiger Tea was inspired by their daughter’s love of tigers. Tiger Tea, like Tiger Balm, had quite a bite to it and a burn too if consumed in great quantities. Tiger Tea was the ideal drink in the winter if you had a cold or flu.

Mr Moon was a full-time sculptor and Mrs Moon ran a quaint arts and folk craft shop in the village, poetically named The Moonbow.

The garden party was planned to go on long into the night, which is why Mrs Moon had taken down the bunting Miss Bunting had draped around the trees and replaced it with a bright silvery pearl-like string of fairy lights, thus making the occasion a most magical one. Certainly this was the case in Mr and Mrs Moon’s starry eyes. Hanging off the trees were glass orbs which normally contained plants but in this case held scented candles.

A jazz band named the Ragtime Ragas had set up their instruments on the lawn and were playing a tune that Tiger was more than familiar with. The toe-tapping tune was none other than ‘Tiger Rag’ by Scott Joplin, one of her grandfather’s favourite pieces of music. In truth, the music was a little loud for Tiger’s taste as children and adults with autism do not like noise, especially loud noise. Nor do they like crowds of people, which, like a giant green dance floor and outdoor ballroom, the lawn was filled with at this moment in time.

Miss Flowers also disliked loud noise, especially if that loud noise was jazz music – a cacophony as she called it. It would not be so bad if the musicians played at the same time and same speed but they did not. To Miss Flowers’ mind the music was raggedy and she did not like anything that was raggedy in appearance – gardens, people (tramps, gypsies and travellers in particular), even animals. Dogs and stray cats she sent packing with a flea in their ear. And she particularly, particularly did not like raggedy tigers, which Tiger had painted upon the wall of the sunken garden and upon which she gazed with disdain.

‘So when are you going to finish the painting of the tiger?’ snapped Miss Flowers spitting the words out of her mouth with some venom. Miss Flowers strode purposefully up and down the lower garden looking at a painting upon the red-brick wall as if she were an art critic in an art gallery or, as Tiger was now imagining the old spinster, a sergeant major in the army. ‘It’s a bit tatty and more than a little rough and ragged around the edges, isn’t it, and you’ve painted over the lines like all young children do,’ Miss Flowers sniffed. She then spat further, ‘Why didn’t you paint a young tiger in its prime? This one seems as if it’s on its last legs. If I were you, young lady, I would paint over it and start again!’

‘It’s supposed to look that