Ginger snorted as Smokey began the strange counting dance with his paws, but Smudge just looked interested, Lucky looking on curiously, the count seeming to go on for quite some time.
“Smudge appears to have a tally of two thousand seven hundred and twenty-one gnats.” said Smokey quickly, as if by speaking rapidly the words were not actually his.
“How many gnats do I have?” asked Lucky, a smile crossing his face as the penny began to slowly drop. This time the count was much quicker.
“Sixty-three.” said Smokey. Lucky nodded.
“And Ginger?” Smokey again did a calculation.
“One hundred and fourteen.”
“Never did get the gnats thing.” said Lucky, looking back to Tiddles,
“So. Your honour, your calories total eight hundred and seventy-three, whilst Ginger’s total is eight hundred and ninety-four.” Tiddles paused, locking a paw and then cleaning his face with it. “Smudge however has a calorie tally of two thousand seven hundred and twenty-one.”
“Gnats don’t count!” shouted Ginger, earning a furious look from Lucky.
“I will decide what counts around here, Ginger! Not you!” said Lucky, and Ginger nestled down on his paws, his whiskers twitching in anger. Tiddles however was now in full flight.
“You see my lord; it seems to me that it isn’t a crime to be different. Smudge here should not be punished with having a master just because she stalks gnats rather than mice. If being different is a crime, then what kind of cats are we? Not educated ones for sure. Smudge’s overall calorie total is considerably higher than both yourself and Ginger. When I was interviewing Sid the Gnat and asking him if he would appear at this court today the only reason he did so, in his own words, was that for an hour at least all of the gnats in the world would know where Smudge currently is and so therefore they are, for an hour at least, safe. It was the only reason that he agreed to appear here today at all.”
Tiddles smiled, working his way between the cats now, purring softly.
“In fact, Sid told me that in the legends of the gnat world, Smudge is known as, “The Oncoming Swarm”.” Tiddles, paused, looking at Ginger in the eye and then, ever so casually, winking.
“The defence rests.” said Tiddles, and having done so sat down.
Lucky smiled and shook his head, licked an ear and then laughed just once in Ginger’s direction, which gave the tomcat a severe case of irritation that he was keen to take out on whatever poor creature crossed his path very shortly.
“Case dismissed.” said Lucky, “Smudge you are free to go.”
There were several annoyed meows from the prosecution but it was getting dark and they were all keen to be on their way, and so it all settled down sooner rather than later.
“Gnats!” spat Ginger, though he knew it was in vain. “Never heard the like!”
Smudge licked her lips and rested her muzzle on Tiddles’ side for a second in gratitude.
“Thanks.” she said, “I knew you could do it.”
“No problem.” said Tiddles, “Just goes to show. Tomcats don’t know everything.”
Smudge smiled and jumped down from the shed roof, all of the cats heading off in separate directions. It was nearly dark now and there was the matter of food courtesy of those who fed them. After that it would be dark and time to hunt. Smudge didn’t concern herself too much though. Gnats were best hunted in daylight, where it was warm yet damp too. She knew where. Heading back through the door of the house she began to meow loudly. It was feeding time, and tomorrow was another day. She needed food to keep her in top condition, for there were always more flutteryflutterylittlenuisancesiwilljumpandtheneatyou gnats to hunt, and she was apparently a bit of an expert at hunting them.
It was time to eat.
In fact, it was always time to eat.
Tee heeQuod she and clepe the window to
The summer of nineteen seventy was warm and dry; not as warm as that of the tarmac melting, water rationed, ladybird infested summer four years later, but it was hot enough. When the Autumn approached and it was time to return to school, it was still sufficiently warm enough to make us feel despondent about the return to the classroom and what was then our only routine. Looking back on it now it all seems so simplistic; so easy, but at the time it was like mining at the coalface or slogging our guts out on a daily basis, so seriously did we take it. (Not counting weekends and six endless weeks’ worth of holidays in the summer of course.)
English was my favourite subject. I was good at it, and more than that I enjoyed it too. Back then all I wanted to do was cram as much of it in as I could. I don’t mean spelling and punctuation of course, though there were elements of that. I mean the books, the poetry, the words that provided sheer joy each time that I spent time reading them.
The year before in my first year at what I had the time thought of as, “big school” we had been introduced to “The Hobbit” and after that of course, inevitably “The Lord of the Rings” which we had of course devoured, and for a while it was all that we thought about. Then it was on to the next book, and the one after that and then more and more and more. My thirst for words was endless and never-ending, and to some degree it continues to this day.
A lot of this of course depended upon the teacher. This year we had a new teacher, called Mister Taylor. John, I think, was his first name, though I am not entirely sure as we never ever used a teacher’s Christian name. The other was Mister Cook and I can safely say that I never even knew his first name. Absolutely not. The contrast between the two teachers was marked. Mister Taylor was young, presumably fresh out of teacher training school and he was young, confident and rebellious; full of ideas. He wore what was an attempt at a suit and tie, though he often seemed to lose his jacket, and the knots of his brightly coloured ties were always in the middle of his chest. It was if the tie itself was melting somehow.
Mister Cook was head of English for the school, wore a black suit and tie and a teacher’s gown, which he was never seen without. His gown was dusty and white and he smelled of chalk dust and ink. He was dour; a man of few words and his classroom was also the library. When you were in his lessons you sat up straight and listened. Woe betide the pupil found gazing out of the window or not paying attention. Yet I found he had a calm demeanor too. He was quiet, thoughtful, almost. I think that the entire class thought he was most probably the most boring teacher on the entire planet.
Mister Taylor used to take us out onto the playing fields if it was sunny, snaking along in a line like a gathering of eager to learn little meerkats. We would sit in a circle and he would read to us, jackets off and the sun beating down on us, making concentration on his lessons at best a haphazard affair.
He owned a Dalmatian dog and in school lunch hour you could see him running with it and throwing a ball as he gave it some exercise. I think it was typical of the time that not one of us gave a thought of where he kept the dog during lesson times, though John Martins had once said he had heard barking coming from the little garden behind the school kitchen.
“Want to be careful that they don’t cook it.” Kevin Reilly had said. “Make a nice pie would that Dalmatian.”
“Spotted pie.” I mumbled and they laughed.
Mister Taylor taught us about Kes and no doubt some of the mother books that were “in” or trendy at the time, but Mister Cook taught the classics: Shakespeare, Chaucer and Pope. Dear God, how he was hated for it! One day Roger Halstow asked what Mister Cook thought of Tolkien, and to our almost indignant surprise Mister Cook tutted.
“Ponderous.” he muttered, staring out of the window as he often did. Most of the class thought he was senile, and he was due to retire the year after we knew, for already the other English teachers were jockeying to fill his shoes. He must have been therefore sixty-four, as early retirement in the nineteen seventies was only ever on health grounds I would have imagined, and most definitely not something to look forward to.
“I fail to see why such a distinguis
hed professor goes to the lengths of constructing a whole British mythology when there is a perfectly serviceable one there already.” We tried to protest but he held up his hand, chalk dust gathered about his robe cuffs and on his fingers, and we were silent. “Ponderous.” he repeated again and we were back to learning about real middle English, and the Canterbury Tales and in particular the Miller’s Tale.
The battle lines were not really drawn. It was a unanimous decision. Mister Cook was boring; Mister Taylor was fantastic. Yet I hid a secret, for I felt sorry for Mister Cook. He obviously was just going through the motions of what he was doing, and had probably been doing for all of forty years. There was no emotion, no winks or nods as certain passages were read. His lessons were like a museum of words, and I often thought that his constant glaring out of the window was a serious desire to be somewhere else; anywhere else really, and that he was just as bored by the whole situation as we without a doubt were too. It was very much the case of the bored teacher and the trapped pupils forced to spend unproductive and challenging times together.
I had another secret. Not only did I like Shakespeare; I understood it. Most of my classmates would just throw their hands up in the air and wail about how it did not make any sense and why were we learning how they used to speak half a century or more ago? I had no answer of course, but the words did seem to captivate me and when Mister Cook read them I caught occasionally from time to time (and you had to really look for this) a gleaming or a shine to the words he was reading, as if he was enjoying them.
The only way I can describe it is as if he was tasting the text almost, savouring the words of the author as he read them aloud. Forty years of teaching to uninterested schoolboys had more or less eradicated any joy the words held for him, but there were traces of pleasure left if you knew where to look for them, and I spotted them quite easily.
Chaucer was of course an entirely different prospect. The language was difficult, the themes pronounced and hard to avoid. Yet Mister Cook tried to tease the nuances out, which was difficult given the subject matter. The Miller’s tale, which was the one we concentrated on, was a bawdy tale of a cuckolded husband who has rather a nasty encounter with a red hot poker being placed in a place where you most definitely would not want a poker to be placed at all.
This in the tale was revenge for the lady of the tale farting in her suitor’s face, the climax of which was when she was done she laughed and closed the window quickly.
“Tee hee quod she and clepe the window to.” read Mister Cook, watching us carefully as we tried very very hard not to giggle at the thought of the woman farting in a man's face. Not many of us managed it, but Mister Cook looked at us sternly and soon the giggling subsided. He sighed, and looking out of the window, book in hand he continued to read the next section. He very rarely needed to look at the book we had all noticed, such was his command of the pieces he was reading; one year the examining board would use one piece, another year the next, and so on in a haphazard form of rotation. In classics there were rarely, by definition, any new works to speak of.
One day I was outside, walking up between the blocks of the classrooms and the main school building. I looked up to see Mister Cook gazing out beyond the school and into the playing fields beyond. Looking in the direction he was staring in I saw Mister Taylor running with his Dalmatian in the fields, throwing a stick and waiting for the dog to retrieve it, which it did with apparent great joy and ease. I looked back to the window and Mister Cook was gone. Whether he had noticed me looking or not I would never know, but he was gone now.
Looking back on it now I wonder if Mister Cook felt a little bit like Elvis Presley did when he met the Beatles? It is not a great analogy I know, but it kind of works. Mister Taylor, young and energetic, full of ideas. Mister Cook, old, dour and bored, sitting out his retirement which probably couldn’t come soon enough.
But what do you do with all of those words when they stop meaning anything to you anymore?
“Tee hee quod she and clepe the window to” said Mister Cook the next day as we read through the passage yet again. Repetition was the name of the game back then. It did not matter if you knew what Macbeth’s intent was to not. If you could repeat his soliloquies word for word then you were heading for top marks, and that's all there was to it. Geography? Remember a graph. History? Remember a battle, and so on it went. Talent was not king. Memory was.
Even now I can hear him say those words. Phonetically, mouthing them perfectly, never hesitating or stammering. “Tee hee quod she and clepe thee win doe too” he said, and as he said it I repeated it under my breath, my mouth rounded with the words, forming a large ‘O” to give the words room to breathe. I thought that I was doing it silently, but I must have been mistaken for when I looked back to Mister Cook he had stopped, watching me carefully.
I blushed furiously of course, more so when he approached my desk.
“See me after class.” he said and moved away. There was a low mumbling around the other pupils which very quickly faded and for the next thirty minutes or so I sat wondering what it was that I had done, and more importantly, what my punishment was going to be.
“Do you enjoy Chaucer?” said Mister Cook after the class had been dismissed and we were alone in his classroom library.
“It is quite difficult sir.” I said, stuttering slightly. “I looked ahead to the knight’s tale and it is written entirely different.”
“Not so difficult. Just different really because it is high bourne speech you see.” said Mister Cook. “The Miller's Tale is a bawdy tale, meant to embarrass the host of the party.” He tapped his nose and smiled. Something that I had never seen him do before. “Hence all the farting.” he said and I blushed even redder but managed also a laugh...
“You have a talent for English, you know.” he said and I fidgeted. “You should keep it up. I know everyone around here thinks I am an old fuddy duddy. A dinosaur.”
I shook my head slowly, but he was right, and he knew it. I think I saw more in him than the other pupils, but that was probably because I was actually listening. From down the hall came the sound from the other classrooms as the teachers for the next lessons tried to settle their classes before they began.
“Sit down, Samuels!” I heard Mister Taylor bellow from along the corridor, “You look like a jack in the box perched there!” There was laughter from the class and slowly it began to settle.
“I had better let you get to your next lesson.” said Mister Cook, “Wouldn’t do to be late.”
“No sir.” I smiled, shouldering my duffle bag and heading to the door. “Thank you sir.”
“Don’t ever mistake style for substance.” he said as I neared the door, and he smiled.
I can hear his words now, forty-six years later. The strange thing is, of Mister Taylor’s class I can remember nothing at all. I remember the dog, and the trips out to the playing fields, his lack of jacket and tugged down tie, but beyond that nothing whatsoever.
Yet of mister Cook I can hear him say those words. Those and others too.
“Tee hee quod she and clepe thee win doe too” he had said, and when I remember it I still move my mouth, make an “O” shape and let the words spill out, and I think to myself after all of these years and after all that I have done and can remember, how sad it is for all of those other pupils that when the chips were really down and it was so important, they put all of their money on the wrong horse.
To The Lighthouse
(Dedicated to Level Nine)
The “Eridani-E Edict”
“With the limited resources remaining to the peoples of planet Earth in the year 2192 and following the successful identification of planets far away beyond our solar system following the launch of thousands of deep space probes, mankind’s initial instinct for self-preservation awaited only the advancement of science to enable the human race to reach the stars. Yet it is not always the case that new tech or new science provides such an answer. Cryogenic freezing was now highly
advanced, but star drives were still just a myth. Perhaps, considered the free peoples of planet Earth, they would always be so.
So the thought that a simpler solution was available was much welcomed. Quite simply, ammonia ice rings could be gathered by any craft as it started its journey to the stars, and the snowball of ice would be frozen and netted with it, providing sufficient fuel for the journey. The tech was poor and outdated; the solution breath-taking. Man could colonise the stars, and so plans were set in place, and the Eridani Edict began.
The ship bound for Eridani-E, named Austin 3 was moved into Earth’s orbit and the nine rings of two hundred thousand cryogenically frozen human passengers were towed into place. Once done the ship fired its fusion drives and moved out of Earth’s orbit, beginning its journey.
Once free of the solar system however the gathering of the ammonia ice began, and soon the net towed by the ship was filled with frozen fuel. The remaining crew of technicians and engineers entered cryogenic sleep, the ship now completely run on automatic systems.
Slowly but surely the sleeping crew of the Austin 3 moved into space and towards Eridani-E, the colonists and crew sleeping an endless sleep, dreaming an endless dream…”
“Kim Kimberley. You are charged with the protection of the colonists and crew of the Austin 3. You will be cryogenically frozen once the gathering of the frozen ammonia has ended. As you are aware your AI wristband has a hook up to the main ship systems and in the case of any emergency you will be woken from your sleep. You will however only be woken if the ship encounters serious peril. The AI freezer mechs will not recognise your presence. “Nightingales” the techs have nicknamed them, because I assume they protect the frozen colonists as if they were their own brood. They will attempt to stop you leaving your freezer cell. We cannot program them otherwise. Hence your wristband is fitted with a small EMP pulse deflector. Employ it if they attempt to stop you.
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