by John Meadows
‘Bloody fencing,’ I thought morosely, ‘my application form must have been so vague that they have put me on the maintenance staff’ I stood there grinning through gritted teeth expecting to be given a bucket of creosote and a twelve-inch brush.
“I didn’t know you were a fencing instructor,” Richard whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth,” I thought you had just mentioned rugby and football.”
This snapped me out of my doldrums as I replied nonchalantly, “Oh, I’m sure I must have mentioned it to you.”
At the end of the briefing Moose came over to me and said, “John, we were delighted to receive an application from someone who could offer fencing as an activity because we have the facilities and equipment but we haven’t had a counsellor for a few years who is able to teach it.”
This came as somewhat of a relief because it meant that I wouldn’t be confronted in my first lesson by some fourteen-year-old swashbuckling Scaramouch.
“My expertise is only with the foil.”
“Oh, that’s good,” answered Moose, almost relieved, “because we don’t have any sabres or epées.”
“So all my pupils will be beginners?” I asked hopefully.
“Yes, they will be starting from scratch.”
“Perhaps you would like to re-phrase that,” interjected Richard.
“Well, that will be fine with me, because I don’t claim to have the prowess of Errol Flynn.” Richard and Moose raised their eyebrows and smiled simultaneously.
“At fencing, that is.”
“I see that you were taught fencing at University by a visiting French instructor,” said Moose seemingly impressed as he looked at his notes.
“Yes, it was a certain Monsieur Creosote, perhaps you’ve heard of him?”
‘Britain and America are Two Countries Divided by a Common Language’
Here’s one to ponder. It was a bright sunny Friday and the morning sun was rising over the green fields of the Michigan countryside. As usual, everyone began making their way from their cabins to the dining room for breakfast. Richard and I had an extra spring in our step because it was our first day off and we were looking forward to a day of relaxation and checking out the local area. We sat at a table with Bruce and Bob, who were having breakfast with two very pretty girls. Judy was a swimming instructor who had raven-coloured hair and, unusually for someone with a dark complexion, pale blue eyes. Her friend Debbie, who was an arts and crafts instructor, could be described as her exact opposite, with shoulder length blonde hair, peaches-and-cream complexion and brown eyes. Debbie turned to Richard and me and said cheerily, “Hey, you guys are off duty today, so why don’t you join us and we’ll take a drive into Kewadin this afternoon and then spend the evening in town.”
“That’s very hospitable of you,” I answered gratefully.
Richard nodded in agreement and asked, “What do you usually do for entertainment?”
“Oh,” answered Debbie, “we usually have a bite to eat in a diner, and then shoot some pool and share a few pitchers of beer in a couple of the local bars. Then we round off the evening with a shag.”
I had to change my trousers. Unfortunately, I was taking a gulp of orange juice at the most inopportune moment, and it seemed to explode from every orifice in my head.
“Thank you,” I coughed and spluttered as Richard sat there nonplussed, while shaking his head slightly and waggling his index finger in his ear as if to say ‘Am I really hearing this?’
We tried our best to disguise our shock and embarrassment, and left the breakfast table saying, “See you later, can’t wait for tonight.”
As we walked back down to our cabins we had a laugh as we looked forward to our night out. As we passed people on the path I would point exaggeratedly to my wet fawn chino trousers and shout, “Orange juice!” as if I had Tourette’s syndrome.
“These American girls are certainly direct and straight to the point,” commented Richard, totally perplexed.
“Yeah,” still blowing my nose while coughing and wiping my eyes. “Did you notice that not one of them batted an eyelid?”
“So you don’t think we should build our hopes up?” asked Richard with an understandable air of disappointment.
After a few moments thought, I said to him, “You know, I seem to remember that there is an Elvis Presley rock’n’roll song of the 1950s called ‘Rip It Up’ and I have often wondered how they got away with some of the lyrics.”
“What lyrics?”
It was my cue to burst into song, quietly:
“Saturday night and I just got paid,
A fool about money, don’t try to save,
A shag on down by the social hall,
When the place starts jumpin’, gonna have a ball.”
The penny dropped. “She meant a dance,” we said together, laughing, albeit through clenched teeth.
“Great lyrics though,” I mused as we continued our walk. “They are right up there with Dr Hook and The Medicine Show when they sang ‘When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, it’s hard.’
“Oh by the way,” I shouted to Richard as I went into my cabin to change my trousers, “I think from now on we should stop calling the Maplehurst cat Pussy.”
‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...’
Some things are quintessentially American: mom’s apple pie, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a Disney parade, a ticker-tape welcome loved by everyone except perhaps New York road sweepers. Richard and I could hardly contain our excitement when the camp director (‘camp’ in this context being a noun not an adjective) announced that we would be going on a hay-ride to toast marshmallows over a campfire. Half a dozen huge flat-bed trailers were hitched up to a series of tractors and tow trucks, and piled high with loose straw and bales of hay. Everyone clambered aboard in an unseemly rolling maul reminiscent of boarding time with Ryanair, and the whole wagon train trundled off along a sun-dappled, deeply rutted dirt track. Richard and I glanced at each other with an unspoken ‘Isn’t this fun’ expression. I couldn’t resist chewing on a length of straw and hollering, “Ee, ha!” It was if we had stumbled on to the set of the musical ‘Oklahoma’. Even though we were travelling at little more than walking pace, the trailer started to bounce about alarmingly, and we were all tossed around as if we were on a wooden trampoline. It was like travelling third class on a Victorian railway. One of the boys, Ben Meyers suddenly jumped to his feet and started to frantically scratch around in the straw while trying to maintain his balance by adopting the crouched stance of a surfer (a ‘Quasimodo’ I believe it is called).
“Don’t tell me you’ve lost a needle,” I joked, while grimly hanging on.
“No my glasses,” he blustered, completely oblivious to my attempt at humour. “I can’t see a thing without them.”
It was a relief to ask the tractor driver to stop, if only to give our aching bodies some respite from the constant pounding. Not surprisingly, there was no shortage of volunteers willing to jump off the trailers to look for Ben’s glasses, and everyone dashed around in a chaotic, disorganised melee in the hope of somehow stumbling across them. Unfortunately the surrounding grass was long (not quite as ‘high as an elephant’s eye’), and was soon transformed into an alien crop-circle designed by Picasso. It was becoming an impossible search, even if his glasses had been fitted with a black-box recorder. Then I had a brainwave. I shouted for everyone to stand still and I asked Ben to give me an approximation of where we were when his glasses fell off. He pointed vaguely to an area and I looked towards the late afternoon sun, which was low in the sky. I walked off in the opposite direction and started to bob up and down in the grass like a Meerkat on a termite mound looking out for predators.
All the kids and staff stood and watched with bemusement as I moved around, jumping up and down like Mick Jag
ger at a Rolling Stones Concert. After about a minute I finally found the critical angle as I glimpsed a reflection of the sun from something in the grass. I instructed the nearest person to follow my directions and then, hey presto, the glasses were held aloft triumphantly as if we had found buried treasure. I received a spontaneous round of applause which I milked with a deep bow as if I had performed a spectacular conjuring trick.
“Have you got some kind of x-ray vision?” I was asked as I climbed back on to the medieval rack to complete our torturous journey. Thank goodness it was only another half a mile.
We set up camp next to the lake and made a log fire. It reminded me of bonfire night growing up in St Helens, except that we used to roast potatoes, which invariable ended up tasting like a brick of charcoal. The marshmallows were toasted on the end of a twig, and the taste was about the same. The seating arrangements were simply a circle of logs, well-polished by generations of bottoms, and the toilet facilities consisted of a single corrugated metal hut which contained a chemical toilet and a wash basin. It stood in splendid isolation about thirty metres away, hopefully downwind. Today’s equivalent would be a portacabin used at music festivals, country fairs, or building sites, but in those days there didn’t seem to be an adequate description in American or English to signify such a structure. If it had been in Australia it would have been known as the ‘dunny’, which sums it up and can’t be bettered. As it stood there, silhouetted against the lake with the moon reflecting off the tin roof, it had an eerie presence like Dr. Who’s TARDIS (which is of course an acronym for ‘time and relative dunny in space’). At one stage I thought it was actually going to disappear as the familiar sound effect started to echo across the field. Then I realized it was just somebody straining with a touch of constipation. I blame the marshmallows. The karate instructor, Juan, brought his guitar, and after a few songs each person was invited in turn to tell a story or a joke.
Juan Martinez was a counsellor from Mexico who had a very pleasant, courteous manner, and we got on together very well. He was tall and athletic, which was to be expected from a Karate instructor, and very good looking, with naturally shiny jet black hair, dark eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. He played guitar and I was at the beginner’s stage (still am, some might say), so I was eager to learn a few more chords. We chatted about martial arts and I asked him what the difference was between a top grade brown belt (1st kyu) and the next grade which is a 1st Dan black belt. He told me that technically there was little difference in technique and discipline at that level. The main difference was in perception and spatial awareness. Someone achieving black-belt status has developed a 360º second sense. Why am I telling you this? Well, it was a conversation that I was very grateful to have had. I was able to avoid a potentially dangerous situation a couple of months hence (More of which later). Terry Banner was a natural comedian and raconteur, our ten year old Woody Allen mini-me, and he was the star of the evening. They laughed at my Art College and Rainhill mental hospital stories, and I found out, that through the eyes of American children, the general perception of England was either chocolate-box thatched cottages, foggy, rainy black and white films set in London or Hammer horror films and haunted houses. They asked me if I would tell them a ghost story from England. It was too good an opportunity to miss as a ready-made audience of eager faces illuminated by the dancing light of the flames waited in anticipation. To give my story a veneer of authenticity, I told them that it happened on a country lane close to Rainhill Hospital one dark, rainy night...
A young couple were driving home after a night out at an Olde English Pub. After a few miles, the car spluttered to a halt.
“Oh no, we’ve run out of petrol,” groaned the driver to his girlfriend.
“How original,” she sighed with a disbelieving smile.
“No, this isn’t a ploy. We really have run out of petrol.”
They had passed a petrol station about half a mile back, so he suggested that she should wait in the car and he would jog there and fill up a can. She balked at the idea, but, in view of the fact that the rain was becoming torrential, she agreed. She sat there for a while, occasionally switching the windscreen wipers on to give a clearer view of the road ahead. After about half an hour she started to become a little anxious since her boyfriend should have returned by that time. She noticed some car headlights in the rear-view mirror and she breathed a sigh of relief, presuming that a Good Samaritan had offered him a lift back to his vehicle. But the car just slowed down, indicated to overtake, and passed by with the driver merely giving her a cursory glance. After a further fifteen minutes she became worried and her imagination went into over-drive. Has he been hit by a car along this dark, wet country lane? Was the garage closed and he has had to go looking for another? Once again she looked in the rear-view mirror, and to her great relief she could see, through the rain-soaked rear window, the shape of a figure walking along the road towards her. As the silhouetted image got closer, she could see that he was carrying something in his right hand. ‘Thank God,’ she said to herself with an audible gasp, and she started to relax for the first time in almost an hour. He arrived at the car and stopped at the back. She assumed that he was about to pour the petrol in to the tank from the can she had seen him carrying. She settled into her seat and started to breath easily, when suddenly she was shocked bolt upright by an enormous bang on the roof of the car.
‘Boom!’ followed by a steady, ‘Boom’, ‘Boom’, ‘Boom’.
She sat there terrified, and switched on the windscreen wipers to get a clear view outside. The consistency of the liquid running down the windscreen became thicker and started to smear. ‘What is it?’ she thought, ‘It looks like blood.’ She closed her eyes momentarily, wondering what to do, and when she opened them she let out a loud, blood-curdling scream that pierced the night air as she stared straight into the eyes of her boyfriend. His severed head was being held by his hair by someone, something, on top of the car. It wasn’t the petrol can she had seen someone carrying; it was her boyfriend’s head (At this point in my story the kids and counsellors around the campfire all screamed in unison as if on a rollercoaster. Bob, who was sitting next to me, gasped and fell over backwards off the log).
The girl’s living nightmare was only broken by the sounds of sirens approaching as a police car and an ambulance screeched to a halt at the side of the car. After a brief scuffle, a figure was led away to the ambulance. The police tapped gently on the passenger window and coaxed her to eventually open the door. They explained that a crazed psychopath had escaped from the hospital and unfortunately her boyfriend had met him on the road.
Around the campfire there was a stunned silence as Bob managed to regain his composure and resume his seat.
“Meadows, that story was complete crap,” announced Robert Minichello dismissively, destroying the atmosphere. “I’m going to take a shit.”
“Hey, Minichello, where are you going to take it to,” I shouted.
He just gave me the finger as he made his way across the field. Bob and I looked at each other, and it was obvious that the same idea had entered our brains simultaneously like a mist rolling in from the lake. We picked up a plastic football and sneaked towards the ‘dunny’. With the dexterity of circus acrobats, Bob hoisted me silently onto his shoulders, and, with the ball in both hands, I was able to reach out to the centre of the corrugated tin roof. I brought it down like the ‘Hammer of Thor’ ... ‘Boom! I underestimated the force as the tin structure reverberated like a sonic boom. I looked up, expecting the sound waves to sway the trees or blow out the fire. But it still wasn’t too loud to completely drown out the unearthly wailing of a screaming banshee from within.
‘Boom’, ... ‘Boom, ... but on the ‘B’ of the fourth boom, the toilet door flew open and Minichello sprang out like a greyhound from trap number one, only faster. I didn’t think that it was possible for a human being to run at that speed, especially with
his pants around his ankles. Bob and I had to help each other to limp back to the campfire. I had bruised my shoulder and he had twisted his knee. Bob had gone weak at the knees and dropped me. We had fallen about laughing, quite literally.
During that night, back at our cabin, my subconscious mind must have still been in horror-story mode as images of criminally insane axe murders, one looking uncannily like Robert Minichello, populated my intermittent dreams. As I drifted in and out of the twilight zone, I felt something moving over my feet on the outside of my sleeping bag. I froze rigid. By now I was wide awake. Did I dream it? Was it just the natural movement of my padded sleeping bag? Then I felt it again, but this time moving up the side of my leg against the logs of the cabin wall. I lay there rigid and petrified as my imagination started to run wild. We were in the back of beyond in rural Michigan, surrounded by woods, fields and lakes. No mental institutions in the immediate vicinity, as far as I knew. Has some nocturnal creature crept out of the woods in search of prey? Could it be a snake, a polecat, or a cougar? My imagination started to run wild. I sensed beads of sweat starting to appear on my forehead, and worried that it might be a creature that could smell fear. Then it moved again, and this time reached as far as my waist. I was glad that I was inside a zipped-up sleeping bag but I couldn’t risk it reaching my exposed head. I flew off the bed as if I had an internal coiled-spring and scrambled around in the dark to find my bedside torch. With trepidation I shone a light on my bunk and underneath expecting to be met by evil red eyes lurking in the darkness. Nothing... Everyone else was dead to the world. Some turned over and muttered in their sleep, while Bob interrupted his snoring momentarily with a deep exhalation of breath that caused his lips to flap about cartoon style. Sleep was the last thing on my mind. I hesitantly looked under every bunk as you do when going to bed after watching a late-night horror movie on television. Still nothing... A couple of windows were slightly ajar so I assumed, hoped, that whatever had stalked me had skulked, crept, or slithered off into the forest. I slept very lightly, if at all, for the rest of the night, and it was a relief when the sun came up. As everyone began to stir, I thought I would have another look round the cabin in the daylight.