“On the top shelf of the wardrobe in my bedroom, there is a small wooden cigar box with some medals in it. I want you to keep the shiny ones and I want you to sell the dull looking one, but make sure you sell it to a medal enthusiast.
“Take good care of your Mum, little man”.
He signed the second page, “All my love, Bampy Joe”
The dull looking medal turned out to be a Victoria Cross, and it was worth a fortune.
Both Angela and Charlie had started crying again but Angela then said, “You know what, Betty? He really couldn’t have timed it any better”.
Angela softly blew her nose before handing Betty a letter she’d received from her landlord just the day before.
“Dear Mrs Clark,
“I regret to inform you that I will not be able to renew your tenancy due to economic reasons. However, because you have made the place look so nice and have spent so much money on it, I will give an extra week’s notice to the usual four weeks – but you still need to be out by the fifteenth of next month”.
Angela’s landlord had always said that he would never kick her out because she was such a good tenant. She had put her heart and soul into that little flat, as well as a fair bit of money. Now that she'd got it looking so lovely, the landlord had decided to capitalise on the situation. As it happens, after Angela and Charlie moved out, the landlord filled the place with foreign immigrants, who ended up trashing the place and refusing to pay any rent.
CHAPTER EIGHTTEEN
MICHAEL STAINS
“Karma may be a bitch but she never suffers a case of mistaken identity”. ~ Angela Clark
Michael Stains was an unsavoury character. He’d been in and out of the juvenile courts more often than the judges. He’d gotten quite used to the leniency of modern times and come to the conclusion that he was untouchable. Just now, he was revving up his new Yamaha 250 motorcycle – much to his neighbours’ lack of delight.
“Don’t you get killed on that blooming thing”! his mother yelled through the window. “They’ll stop my benefits and then where will I be”? His mother almost bit through the cigarette that was hanging out of her mouth while screeching on, “and don’t get caught on it either. I’ve been up to the courts enough this month”.
“Sod ’em”, came the arrogant reply. “They can’t touch me, bunch of gutless idiots”.
As his mother closed the window and went back to her favorite morning chat show on the television, Michael muttered, “Stupid, fat cow”, under his breath. He then put on his helmet and roared off down the road.
It was either the letter from the council telling Sally Sour that her services were no longer required, or the discovery that she had in fact not inherited anything from Joe that had taken over Sally’s brain. Sally was lost in a world of her own, as she thought about what she would say to the solicitor when she asked about her chance of contesting Joe’s will.
Michael was about to mistakenly ride the wrong way down a one-way street, so he avoided the road by riding along the pavement. Unfortunately, that was the precise moment that Sally Sour chose to step out from behind the overgrown privet hedge that grew in her front garden. There was a sickening thud as the handlebars of the bike whacked poor Sally in the back and threw her toward a parked car. The wing-mirror broke the fall for her neck, and the mirror itself sliced clean off in the process. Sally Sour lay unconscious on the pavement.
Michael was all right apart from the fact that Sally’s accident had bent the handlebars on his bike. But, in due course, he fixed the bike and ended up selling it back to his best mate, lanky Larry, at a considerable loss. Lanky Larry was happy about this until the police came knocking on his door and arrested him for a multitude of traffic offences. The presiding judge at the court hearing gave Larry an extra year in prison for trying to worm out of the charges with his story about it being someone else who was riding the bike that day. He got seven year’s prison in total.
The doctors and surgeons pulled out every stop to save Sally Sour. They had only recently lost a young mother and son who had been in a car accident, and so were determined to save this one. When Sally finally came to, she was buzzing from all the morphine that had been pumped into her, and now the doctor was matter-of-factly telling her what had happened to her.
“The reason why you can’t feel your legs, Ms Sour, is because your spine has been broken and you are paralyzed from the waist down. Your right hand needed metal pins in it and you should regain the use of it, over time. Oh, your voice box was also damaged in the accident and we don’t know yet whether you will get the full use of it back”.
“The main thing though is that you are alive”, the then doctor said in an overly cheerful voice, as if that information made it all better. “You really must have someone looking after you”. The doctor said this while pointing up toward where everyone thinks God resides.
“Meanwhile, the nurses will be round every day to clean you up while we look for somewhere suitable for you to be placed when you leave the hospital. Yes, you’re a very lucky woman, indeed”, he said giving Sally a pearly smile and patting her on her hand with the IV in it.
The morphine helped mask the true horror of what was unfolding in Sally’s life, but she was soon weaned off it and three weeks later sour Sally was moved to Nazareth House.
Nazareth House was owned and run by Mrs Brown and Mrs Brown’s motto was, “Profit first, care later”. It was a satisfactory motto for her and her staff to live by. Nazareth House was a tatty little nursing home which only just barely scraped through its annual inspections.
Mrs Brown was a dumpy woman with huge calves and fat ankles. She was as wide as she was tall – fully earning her nickname of ‘Four by Four’, as she was four feet tall and nearly four feet wide. She had the most terrible dermatitis on her forearms which she never bothered to cover up. She could often be seen scratching her arms while serving up the food, which gave many a dish served at Nazareth House a parmesan cheese-like appearance.
She carefully monitored the quantity of food for each patient and she was very careful about how much she spent. Her preferred method of giving ‘suppositories’ to the patients was to sit them on the loo, then stand behind them and startle them by unexpectedly bursting a balloon. “Works like a treat every time”, she would say, and packs of balloons were, of course, cheaper than the real thing.
Mrs Brown disliked Sally Sour from the word go. Sally was always pulling and poking at the staff with her one good hand and forever making disapproving grunts. But Mrs Brown was paid almost twice as much by the council for Sally than for the regular ‘stiffs’ as she used to call them, so there was no way that she was going to allow this golden goose of hers to leave Nazareth nest. Sour Sally had no feeling from the waist down, which matched the lack of feeling Mrs Brown had from the waist up toward her patients, so the staff had to clean Sally up every day which gained her the nickname of ‘The Baby’.
When Mrs Brown needed to punish a staff member, she put them on ‘Baby Duty’ for a couple of weeks. Invariably, it was the young employees who ended up getting old ‘Smelly bum’, as they like to call Sally.
The girls weren’t very good at what they did and, to be fair, they shouldn’t have even been in that kind of job – but there wasn’t a lot else on offer for young girls who left school with no qualifications. So that was how Sally Sour ended her days, having to put up with all of the misery that she had heaped on too many other people throughout her bitter life. Later on, Mrs Brown even had a defibrillator installed in Sally's room so that she could be revived in the case of a sudden heart attack.
Shortly after Angela and Charlie moved into Joe’s house, Charlie was puzzled because he couldn’t find any of the volumes to The Chronicles of Us, despite looking everywhere. However there was still one volume on the shelf, this being the one that Joe had read his stories from. Charlie told himself he’d have to make do with that one but when he sat down to read it, he saw only blank pages. It suddenly dawned on
him that Joe had made up all the stories himself, which just made Charlie even more in awe at the memory of his old friend.
Joe's spirit never came to visit Charlie – not in his dreams or in any other way. This didn’t upset Charlie, as he felt he’d received so much from Joe when he was alive and he was glad the old man was finally resting now that he was dead
Nettie gently swung on the swing and watched Joe coming up the path toward her. Nettie looked to be about five years younger than she’d been when she died at age 10. Five was her favorite age because she looked so cute then. Joe was now in his early forties, as that had been his favorite age – and a very handsome man he now was.
“Are you waiting for me, Treacle”? Joe asked happily.
“Yep, I’m waiting for you”, echoed Nettie with a smile stretching from ear to ear.
She jumped off the swing, walked over to Joe and placed her hand in his. And as they walked together toward the white light, Nettie asked, “Are we going to be all right, Bampy Joe”?
Joe replied in his soft caring voice, “Yes, my darling, we’re going to be just fine. It was only a game. They call it ‘The Game of Shepherd and Dawse”.
EPILOGUE
MORE ON THE THEORY
OF SHEPHERD AND DAWSE
When the game of Shepherd and Dawse begins, there are two opposing teams of people. Each team wants to win the game, although if the two tribes were left as they started out, this game of life would never be played – as the Shepherd tribe would never want anything to do with the disgusting and vile Dawse tribe. So through fate, and perhaps divine intervention, the two tribes eventually meet, commingle and interbreed. This is the very early start of the game and at this point it’s still relatively easy to identify who plays for which side. However after thousands of years of intermixing, no tribe is what it once was – not Shepherd nor Dawse – and things become a little more complicated.
The two tribes thrive on opposing types of energy. On one side is the Shepherd tribe, who flourishes on love, compassion, empathy, positivity and creativity. On the other, is the Dawse tribe, who perpetuates an environment of hatred, violence, cruelty, fear and negativity.
If we look out into the world, we can see quite clearly the different traits of each tribe that have been passed down from generation to generation, and without exception we all now possess a certain amount of Shepherd energy and a certain amount of Dawse energy. There is no person alive on this planet today who is pure Shepherd or pure Dawse, though there are a lot of people in whom the genes and traits of each tribe run very strong indeed.
Looks, behaviours and actions will determine what percentage of each tribe a certain person has inherited. In the beginning, it was perhaps looks that counted the most, as this allowed us to see who was who, but when we get this far on in the game, it is looks that count for the least.
Quite often just by chance, or if the accumulation of the right amount of genes come together from two parents, a person is born who looks exactly like what the original members of each tribe looked like all those years ago. But looks can be deceiving and just because someone is born with beautiful features and a body to die for, doesn’t mean that they are nice. They can sometimes be very conceited and generally a nasty piece of work, as they may have inherited all the right genes in the looks department, but then they may have also inherited a lot of the not so nice traits from the Dawse tribe.
Conversely, a person may get unlucky and inherit the Dawse looks and features but be the kindest soul you would ever wish to meet. This is why the longer the game goes on the more complex it becomes and the more complex it becomes the more fun it is to play.
Once the genetic code of each tribe becomes mixed and diluted over many thousands of years it becomes more like an energy within a person, and like all energy it can adapt and be manipulated for good or evil purposes. It can also grow and diminish depending on what type of fuel it is being fed. By the time a person dies, if they have accumulated more Dawse energy inside them than not, then that would be a point to team Dawse. Conversely, if someone dies with more Shepherd energy inside them, then that is a point to team Shepherd.
The Nine–Tenths rule
After the amalgamation of the two tribes was completed, there would never again be a person who was 100 percent Shepherd or 100 percent Dawse. The most any person can be this far on in the game is nine–tenths of either tribe. Even people who appear to be perfect in every way, will have their flaws. A person may be beautiful, successful and always immaculately dressed, but they will have flaws in other areas which when added together will add up to at least 10 percent of their sum total. Even when a person appears perfect in all 10 areas of their life, there will be at least one percent in each area that isn’t perfect. Those 10 one-percent’s will then account for the overall one-tenth of Dawsey traits that even the best people in our world have.
This same rule applies for the not so nice people of our world too. No matter how evil someone is they will have a certain amount of redeeming features that have been passed down to them through the ages. They may be good looking, or charming, or they may be very talented at something. Just by having one of those attributes would make them at least one-tenth Shepherd.
Being nine-tenths of either tribe is still very rare, as the majority of the people playing the game on both sides hover around the 70-80% mark, depending on how much effort they take in being good or bad in the 10 different areas of their life. A person can consciously become a better person by working on their characteristics just in the same way that a person can become nasty and mean if they so choose that path (free will and all).
If a person is born of a Shepherd nature and then becomes nasty, lazy, mean, destructive and self-destructive, then team Dawse has won that soul, another point to them. In the same way, if a person is born nasty, selfish, devious and destructive but finds a better way of life through being nurtured by those around them and applying themselves to live a better life, then that becomes a victory for team Shepherd. This tug of war for souls is going on all the time and some people are targeted more than others.
Each side has a very specific set of tools they use to get their part of the job done, and the aim of each side is to counteract the other, much like a game of human chess.
There are six main tools that Dawsey people use and they are all abuse related. The abuse tools Dawse use are physical, verbal, sexual, financial, emotional and mental. If they can use these tools to good effect, then they stand a very good chance of turning a person into one like them.
Dawse use their tools to the greatest effect on children. This is because children don’t tend to have sophisticated enough defence mechanisms to fully repel the dark energies being placed upon them and if the Dawse abusers can sow a seed of darkness into a child at a young age it can be very hard for that person to pull through. They will most likely end up projecting that dark energy at other people for many years in various different ways, or directing the negative energy inwardly and destroying themselves. Either way, it’s another point won for team Dawse.
Team Shepherd has six tools also, and they use these tools to counteract the six tools of Dawse. Shepherd tools are love, wisdom, empathy, fairness, healing and forgiveness. When any of these tools are used, they will dilute what Dawse energy has done and pull that member of the game back to the Shepherd side.
On the whole we are a mix of two things: nature and nurture. That is to say, the genes we were born with define us as people up to a certain point. After that, the environment we grew up in and the people who surround us help to define the rest of what we become.
Those who were brought up in a loving and stable environment will frequently go on to bring up their own children in the same way — and vice versa. This outcome of a person’s upbringing mostly comes down to nurture, although we sometimes see a scenario where a person is brought up in a loving environment yet turns out to be a very nasty piece of work who couldn’t care less about anyone, because just by chan
ce that person had inherited more Dawsey genes than their parents possessed. Conversely, a child can be brought up in an abusive environment and a filthy house and never look presentable during their childhood, yet grow up to become the exact opposite, due to their true nature eventually shining through.
Players, Pawns and Game Changers
Every person alive is playing the game of Shepherd and Dawse to some degree and can be split into one of three different categories: You will either be a Pawn, a Player or a Game Changer.
Playing the Shepherd Pawn
If you have chosen this role your life will be a fairly simple one. You likely will have had a fairly uncomplicated childhood, done fairly well in your education, go on to meet a partner and no doubt have a couple of children. Your career will likely have a been the standard nine-to-five sort of job with enough wages to live the average kind of lifestyle, never having lots of money to throw around but never being financially desperate either. You won’t have had a lot of tragedy in your life and neither will anything too spectacular happen to you. At times you will have felt under attack from certain Dawse-like characters but you will also have been helped by Shepherd-like individuals, and by and large you will have pulled through fairly unscathed.
The Game of Shepherd and Dawse Page 18