Well, fifteen year old meets fifteen year old, and EJ is clearly madly besotted by his cousin. Sandy (the cousin) looks amused, but no one really says anything. They spend the day in bliss, then we are off - back to the big smoke. On the way, Jim sees a DVD for sale in a roadhouse, "Kissing cousins" with Elvis Presley. He says to me, holding it up for the lad to see, "Do you think we should but this DVD for EJ?"
"Not sure if he is into Elvis," I answered, laughing. "What do you reckon, EJ ... Kissing Cousins? Have you seen or heard of it?"
He just looks glum and says nothing.
And that is the sweet and the sour of things. A short trip to Central Queensland to watch some camels running over the red dirt at Boulia. It almost seems like nothing, yet it is everything life is meant to be. Adventure, fun, love, it was all there. And perhaps it showed a young boy a world with values that are never spoken, a wealth you cannot spend, and a sense of presence that - if you have the eyes for it - shows a boy how to be a man.
The Givernment Tree
A wry and taciturn view on the nature of our society is not always an uplifting and positive message, but perhaps if we don't take it too seriously, and learn to laugh at our absurdities, we may be released from its grip.
It sat in a meadow, growing for many years. Such a good givernment tree, it set it's roots deep and spread its branches wide. It offered shelter to the people, and gave them fruit of money from its boughs, never asking for anything but a little tax to water its roots.
For years it grew, giving and giving, and the more it gave, the more the people watered it. import tax, inheritance tax, income tax, customs and excise, so many wonderful ways to water the magnificent tree that gave and gave.
"I need a new bridge!" the city near it called out.
"No problem," answered the givernment, and it sprouted more dollars to pay for the bridge.
"I need a new hospital!" cried out another city.
"Sure thing," answered the givernment, and sprouted a few more dollars.
"We need schools and libraries," the people called out.
"Easy," said the givernment, and once more, it sprouted dollars and gave them freely to all who held out their hands and plucked them from its many, many branches. "All I need now is some tax water poured over my roots, and I can keep on giving.
And so the people labored hard and long, because for some reason the givernment tree now seemed to be extremely thirsty.
"It's all this giving I do," it explained as people started to curse and sweat as they slaved over watering it.
"I am starving!" exclaimed a poor citizen. "My wife is sick. We need food and medical care."
"Of course, just reach up and take whatever you need," said the givernment.
But the tree had grown too tall, and the ordinary person could not reach up and take those dollars it offered so freely.
"You have grown so big, I can't reach you anymore!" the poor person said.
"I am sorry," said the givernment. "You should be more like the large corporations and cities. They have developed apparatus for reaching up and grabbing whatever they need. I am far too big now to be concerned about each individual. But thank you for your taxes."
Then one day, an accountant came along. He examined the amount of tax being used to water the tree, and the amount of dollars the tree handed out, and realized while the tree was still making these dollars for everyone, the taxes that watered it only made it bigger, fatter and taller. In fact, it had grown so tall that only equally large corporations could reap any benefit from its giving.
The accountant sighed, and explained to the Givernment Tree that he would have to cut it down to size, in order for it to represent and help the people it had grown far away from.
The givernment tree realized its mistake and sent a branch of itself down to help the fellow understand how everything worked. Which was, sadly, how he died.
However, the kindly giverment tree used the splinters that had taken the poor fellows life, and continued to give by making a cross for his grave with them.
And on that cross it wrote his epitaph, " Givernment of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth "
Old Harry Jenkins
Some stories are simply beautiful, and need to be told. You will meet a Harry Jenkins in every city, but will you recognize him? I trust that this pithy tale will help you to spot the diamonds in the rough.
Harry still had that fabulous smile, but he was in no mood to be using it right now. Even if it did appear briefly, like when some high grade hooch was smuggled in, it now showed those gaps in the teeth that the prison health system saw as no great priority to fix.
The years had not been kind to him. The strapping youth with the barrel chest and rugged good looks, all that was gone. Too many drugs, too many parties, too many women, it all wore into his face until, at seventy, he looked like a hard driven old truck. His flaming red hair and beard were washed with grey and the twinkling eyes were a mere glower, wearing a pessimism born of twenty-five years for something he didn't do.
"Three score and fooking ten," he muttered under his breath as he gathered his stuff, preparing to walk out from Dartmoor. Freedom was no celebration, a birthday was nothing but another year notched on the belt. He had nothing, no one, and no future. His duffle bag held his only belongings and on his back he had the same shirt as when he went in. His worldly possessions were now a razor, a wallet with almost nothing in it, and a whole lot of hopelessness. He had heard about these tiny little mobile phones, the internet, and Trump being elected President, but it all seemed completely unbelievable.
The world seemed as ridiculous as him getting caught with marked bank notes. That dog who passed them must have thought him a choice idiot. Johnny had pulled the bank job, but when the guard got stupid and died as a result, he dumped the cash and made a run for Greece. The no-name who passed the money off was just doing every fence in town, and he was the fool who took it. He had heard about the new UV checking, but this "Smart Water" was so new he didn't even realize it existed. He got caught with it and though normally it would just be receiving stolen goods, he was holding notes from a robbery where a guard died. Invisible fooking dye, what happened to iodine stain? He was taken in, charged, and though he fully knew who did the job, he said nothing.
He was Scouse, Liverpool Irish, and you remained true to your friends. It wasn't Johnny's fault that Harry was the one who got the garbage notes. Mea Culpa, he bought them for 20% of face value. The oldest story: He was greedy, they were needy, a match made in hell.
But the news! “University teacher in bank robbery”, “Murder and Extortion”, the headlines ran for months. He accepted his fate because he accepted his stupidity. He was on a good wicket and had already made his fortune. It was just habit, and profit, that kept him fencing.
He had started at Liverpool Polytech twenty years before that day he was charged. Why does an old dog take a teaching position? For one, he needed a front. The British motorcycle industry was failing, the Jap bikes were winning everything, and no one was buying Triumphs anymore. He could have flipped his workshop to modifying Japanese, but his soul was in British and European - and in racing. At the end of the Sixties, as the last Bultacos and Nortons faded from the tracks, his once full business started to look bare. That's when he started trading in the stolen bits of kit from the wharves and from there onto money laundering. And while you were at it, some of the drugs that he liked could be traded as well.
Then, out the blue, the Polytech call and say they want him in the engineering shop, teaching would-be mechanics how to modify bikes and engines. Sure, a good gig. Three days a week showing people how to do what he loved doing. Sweet deal, and the cash was good. But it was his selling pot to students that was the real gold mine!
And they loved him for it. Twenty years he had that job, a time when everything in Britain changed. Polytechnics became Universities, and so he went from a drug trading, money laundering, party going,
hard drinking madman into the respected role of a university educator. But he still kept up the fencing. Why? It bought the second house, and the third, and then the forth. All gone now, with the Proceeds of Crime Act, repossessed by the British Government.
If he had been smarter it would have all been locked away in trusts, but he wasn't. He was the best damn teacher about modifying motorcycles, because that is what he loved, but he was not clever or tricky. If there was money, or women, in the picture, he just burned it all. Especially women. Relationships were ships called Titanic in his book: they always started with a celebration and ended by plummeting into the depths of hell.
He laughed at himself. All this thinking and he was still only halfway to freedom. There was no joy in the steps he had to take, going out to a strange world. He had seen the new phones, the on-line stuff, it may have all been in Russian as far as he was concerned. He understood none of it. He signaled to the guard accompanying him that he needed to go to the bathroom. One last look, he thought to himself, one last look before he leaves the sanctuary and gets thrown out into the wilds of civilization.
He stared into the mirror, looking at the face the world would see. The warden had let go the prison hair cut these last few months, you didn’t want to be asking for work with prison hair. It was a crazy bush that covered his head, all mostly grey but still showing streaks of red. The ears, they were still good. The nose, not so good, too many fights and too much booze. The eyes, well, they were permanently bloodshot with a fading blue that seemed to coincide with his failing vision. His chin was still strong, but jowls had appeared, along with too many lines. Thus the beard - it didn’t advertise his age quite so much. He still felt twenty inside, but it was very much a seventy-year-old that looked back out at him - This last twenty five years of wasted time had stolen everything, including his self-respect. How the fuck was he going to get another woman?
The red bushy eyebrows arched just a little with this recognition and he saw the part that really worried him, the fear. It was written across his face in clear letters for all to see, his anxiety. It was a deep-seated terror of what to do now. He had a son, Tom, probably the only decent thing he had ever achieved. Tom said he would be waiting for him outside, but Harry really did not want to leave.
Yet his time was done. It's no blessing to be cast out from what you know into a new world full of strangers. Out there no-one knows or respects you. But it was time to face the music, to walk out into the dismal daylight - into his retirement as a pauper. He had worked so hard to avoid this. His whole life, focused on the money, just to avoid exactly this, poverty. He had watched his father get ground down, drink any money he made, and spend his last days in regret. He had seen his mother struggle every day, holding her head up, even as her husband dragged her down. Harry’s sole aim in his life was freedom and that meant money. It bit him hard to have nothing, real hard. At least he understood his father and that stupid, ignorant decision he made. Old fashioned pride.
Old age coupled with no assets in Britain were a sentence of death, either by cold, loneliness or depression. Generally, all three worked together like they did with his old man. It seemed just yesterday he had offered that drunken wretch freedom from the slavery he made for himself. "Dad, I am rich. Take mom, and make yourself comfortable in a house I bought you out of Merseyside. I will look after everything." But the old bugger was too proud to take anything from his son, the one who did so well where all ‘he’ had done was fail.
The offer is what killed him, or more to the point, killed his pride. Soon after the old man took a few pills to solve the problem of his uselessness. Harry watched his mum slip into depression after that, with her medicine being an old tonic, the Gin and Tonic. She was happy that her son gave her free rent, but the loss of the husband was too much. She absconded into a blur of booze, fading into the slow obscurity of dementia.
He considered himself lucky she was dead before they busted him. It would have broken his heart to see his Mum cast out. All they broke back then was his bank, but Dartmoor! Dammit, it gnawed at your Soul like the rat it was and slowly it broke your will. Night after night he had spent there, living in the shadow of his father's failures, looking at the blank walls.
Harry’s poverty and hopelessness were bad enough, but the worst thing was being cast aside and made useless. Thank God his son, Tom had forwarded on his mail. Almost always it was people with questions about the important things, like how to stop a Triumph leaking oil from the crank. Or how to set SU’s up.
Dear old Tom, absolutely the best thing he had ever done.
Old fashioned letters were what kept him going, that and his love for bikes. Yet now he was out, what next? There would be no government teaching job for him now, no easy gig talking to people. He should be able to get a job in a workshop and maybe Tim Ferguson still had his running. Les Harris died a decade ago, so staying here in Devon was out of the question. He would have liked to see old Les before he passed, the only man who knew Triumphs like he did. But that was done. As it stood he imagined Liverpool was where he would end up.
It was where he grew up and it would be where he died.
His son, Tom, lived at Hightown, just North of his old house, at the old boat shed on Lower Alt. The boy owned his place outright and had done well for himself. He had very kindly offered for his Dad to stay there with his family. Maybe it could work till he found his feet. Harry was not one for charity and apart from that, he was pretty sure the lads wife did not want the boozing, whoring old bastard of a father hanging around their nice, well-behaved kids.
Well, he had reached the gate and the door to freedom creaked open. Freedom? He laughed: Poverty is slavery, but there was nothing for it. He had to go face the rest of his life. Giving a nod to the guards, he made his way across the courtyard and through the main gate. A prisoner no more.
Thomas Jenkins
Tom looked at the frail figure of his father coming out of the shadows. He saw Harry walking under the bell, making a slow journey up to the primitive half-hexagon open gates. There was no happiness in that walk. Out of jail and hunching his way forward into a dismal and wet November morning, Harry was looking very old. The six foot three, broad shouldered giant Tom once knew was gone. The years had bent him over and shrunk that massive chest, while the smoking had dried out the skin and the years had stolen the bright red color from his head and beard.
Not that Tom had seen a whole lot of his Dad when growing up, but when he did, it was glorious. Every time they were off somewhere it was always exciting. Tom would never forget the big laugh, the huge red beard, and the amazing people he would meet. Name any name in bike racing and Tom met them. Everyone respected his father, everyone. And it was these people that his Dad knew and had introduced him to, who had in turn opened up his world and given him everything.
"You are Harry's son? Yeah sure, we will give you a go lad. If you are half the mechanic your Dad was, you'll be owning this shop in ten years." Well, he owned the shop in three. Harry was to thank for it, he just had a word to whoever, and when Tom needed the brass for this shop, or that house, on his father's whisper things just happened for him. Harry never said it to his face, but Tom knew his Dad was the hand behind the scenes.
Harry gave his Mum the money to raise Tom, he even bought their modest house for her. He didn't have to, he didn't even have to visit, but he did. People said he was never much of a father, yet he was always good to Tom. And Tom remembered. He also remembered the harsh sentence in Dartmoor and the years of calling down every week to see his Dad. Twenty-five of them for something he didn't do. It was a punishment designed to force Harry to give up his friends. Eventually, they expected he would crack and tell the story to get himself out. But he never did. The Police knew it wasn't the old man, but someone was going to hang for the crime and the evidence, and his silence, was enough to nail him.
From his many visits, Tom knew his Dad was being looked after by the locals. He had an easy time of it, away from
the spice boys, as they called the drug addicted freaks, and he had a cell on his own. People had respect for Harry, not just for his size and wit, but because he had real talent. Find another man who could assemble a Bonneville with a blind fold on! You have seen the movies where the star assembles a gun blindfolded? Try doing that with a motor bike. Harry could.
Tom had kept his old Jag in good order. It was the one thing not taken by the Police because it had been in the garage getting fixed at the time, and had subsequently "vanished" into a friend's shed for a bit. The '86 XJ6 was one of the classic cars, wood grain dash, leather everything, beautiful. The Pepper finish was still shining, as good as new. Thirty one years on and it still ran like a clock. Harry saw it and his eyes lit up.
Tom wound down the window and waved his father over. "You can't drive it until you get the license renewed. I went to do it, but you need to do a test and get a doctors certificate, but she drives as good as the day you bought her and she is still yours."
Harry ambled up, a brighter gait to his step, "Damn, still looks like new. You done me proud lad, keeping her in such fine fettle." He slips into the passenger seat and looks with sheer delight at the pack of tobacco on the dash. "Bugger me happy, is that Port Royal? Nice."
"I imagined you would want your own brand in it's own packet at last. Shirley did a great job of smuggling the tobacco in all these years."
"Aye, she did lad, that she did. It is what kept me going and is what allowed me to trade for everything I needed in there. And to be true, I have no idea how I am going to get on now I am out. Twenty-five years teaches you a lot about prison, but nothing about the outside world." Harry said, somewhat wistfully. He rolled up a smoke and lit it.
Witch Hunters and Other Stories (2018-2019) Page 17