You who are my regular readers will know that I'm on the run from the police in America, because, in the summer of last year (2007), I killed an American, who, in comments I saw which he'd made on someone's web-log, had insulted Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of England. As a loyal Englishman, I could do no less than demand that this scoundrel (he called himself "Jimmy") apologise, or he would pay a price.
Well, this "Jimmy" showed no contrition, so I flew to America from England, tracked him down and - to cut a long story short - killed him. Unfortunately I, and my men who helped track Jimmy down (in eastern Texas), killed a number of Jimmy's men too. Thus we were forced to become outlaws.
Although killing Jimmy seemed a good idea at the time, it no longer seems quite so. Had I not rushed to the defence of my sovereign I would still be living in comfortable retirement in rural England, instead of living with my three men in a very cramped basement of a demolished house in a Texas city - which I cannot name because the police may have discovered this web-log.
Last time I told of how I and my men, when we were sleeping under a bridge shortly after we'd killed Jimmy and his men, were attacked by eight men. To defend ourselves we had to kill them. What, then, to do about the bodies? I decided we take them with us and find a good place to leave them.
Accordingly we loaded the bodies into our SUV, and, with me at the wheel, we continued south down the highway. As I drove through the morning murk I thought of possible ways to get rid of the eight bodies without others noticing. It was a predicament neither I nor my men had encountered before. Of course, in the trenches of the Western Front in 1914-18, and in the desert of North Africa in 1942-43, many of my comrades, and men under my command, had fallen dead during battle. Their bodies were either just left there because to retrieve them would be too dangerous, or they were carried off by stretcher bearers where feasible.
When my wife, my dear Gladys, passed away, I simply called a funeral home. So, to get rid of not just one body, but eight, and with no official help, was something new for me. You are surely thinking, dear reader, that for a 113 year-old man like me, there'd be no problem I never would have encountered before. But life always presents new and unique problems no matter how long we live. It's what makes life so exciting.
Despite being an old soldier, I have a philosophic mind, so I thought about the non-human world of nature, and how the bodies of all those countless millions of dead animals are everyday got rid of. Whenever an animal knows it’s ready to die it goes off alone, lies down somewhere and simply dies. Immediately the buzzards are picking at its body, and ants and beetles are devouring it. After a day or so there’s nothing left, just bones. In nature nothing’s wasted. It’s all so efficient.
Now I had my solution. I turned our SUV down a side-road, and kept going until we saw a large piece of empty land. We carried the bodies from the SUV and laid them down, each one hundred yards or so apart. We removed the clothes to make it easier for the buzzards and ants and beetles to do their thing. After we burned the clothes, I turned our SUV back onto the highway and we kept on going south.
If I might editorialise, I think if everyone left the bodies of their dead loved ones in a field for the buzzards and ants and beetles to eat, it would contribute to the well-being of humanity. First, think of all the space taken up by cemeteries which occupy valuable land which might otherwise be used to grow food or to build houses or blocks of flats on. I’m aware it’s now the in-thing to burn dead bodies in crematoria, but this contributes to air-pollution.
If leaving the body of your dead loved one in a field for the buzzards and ants and beetles to eat, isn’t your cup of tea, you could always bury it in your backyard. This wouldn’t take up valuable land which could be used for something else, because a backyard will always be a backyard.
I don't expect that those who run funeral homes and operate crematoria will agree with what I advocate, because they would have to find other work. Unfortunately, one can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
The fuss we make about dead bodies has always puzzled me, since a dead body is no different than an old skin a snake has shed. Just as the snake has moved on somewhere else, so has your mater or pater or old aunt also moved on somewhere else, who used to occupy the body you’re weeping copious tears over.
When I die, all I want is for my old body to be left in a field, so the buzzards and ants and beetles can enjoy a good meal.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Thursday, December 04, 2008
The Curious Incident In The Nighttime
Writing this web-log keeps me psychologically grounded, for I feel I'm creating something which people will read long after I go to my Eternal Reward. While writing, I don't dwell on the seriousness of my circumstances.
So this web-log is a refuge, but, obviously, I can't hide in it all the time. Accordingly there are long periods in every day when I consider the situation I and my men, Mikey, Squeaky, and Freddy, are in, and realize that the odds of us evading the American police for ever are small indeed. And not just the American police, but the British police, and the police in any country I and my men might escape to, for the police forces of the world work together. I know this from experience. I was, after all, in the highest echelons of the British security and diplomatic establishments.
But I've never lost hope that I'll escape being caught before I die. Being 113, this isn't impossible. But it is more impossible for Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, for they are mere forty-somethings. Until we have better ideas, we'll continue living in our underground home, which is the basement of a demolished house in an area quite hidden away in a city in Texas which I cannot name because the police may be reading this blog.
Today, I'll continue telling of the events of over a year ago, in 2007, which led to me and my men becoming outlaws in America. Last time, I told of our killing of Jimmy and his men at his house in eastern Texas, and the beginning of our drive south, during which we robbed a gun shop of much of its weaponry. I considered it prudent that, after we left the town where the gunshop was, we keep driving throughout that night.
This is what we did until sunrise. Seeing the sun's rays of morning made me acutely aware that I hadn’t slept all night. I realized how easily I could fall asleep at the wheel of our SUV, and wake up momentarily afterwards as it wrapped itself around a telegraph pole.
I and my men needed to sleep, but where? A motel so soon after we robbed the gun shop would be too risky. Under a bridge out of sight seemed best. I turned our SUV down a side-road and soon we passed over a bridge, not too big, not too small. It seemed perfect for four very tired men to sleep under for the rest of the day.
After we camouflaged the SUV, and carried down to under the bridge our stuff, which, for all intents and purposes was our guns - and also flashlights - for it could be night when we next emerged. We settled down to sleep.
The next thing I knew I was awake because I felt a hard blow on my head. It was dark, so I realized I had slept well into the night. A man was standing over me and beating me with a stick. While warding off the blows, I saw the outlines of other men who were beating Mikey Freddy and Squeaky as they lay on the ground. I hooked out my loaded Magnum .37, which I had strapped to my body, and I began firing at my assailant. Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, who had, on my orders, also strapped guns to themselves before sleeping, were soon firing too.
After some minutes all became quiet, for our attackers were lying on the ground. We turned our flashlights on them, and saw blood oozing through their clothes and from their heads. They were not moving and we assumed they were dead.
From how these men were dressed, and their overall physical appearance, I concluded they hadn’t attained the American Dream – a split-level suburban home, with two-car garage and a dog and a cat. They were obviously of that class of homeless and jobless men whom no-one would ask about for a long time if they disappeared.
What to do with the bodies? of which there were eight. We ruled out just leaving them, because this place might well be the home of yet more men, from whom the American Dream had escaped. They might, on encountering the bodies of their comrades, become upset and tell the police. We therefore loaded the bodies into our SUV, which I drove back on to the highway.
At this point I'll conclude this posting because writing about this incident has revived my anger at our being forced to kill even more men than the ones we'd already killed. It had made the case against us worse should the police ever catch us. These eight men, plus the eight to ten men we'd killed at Jimmy's house, meant we'd killed between sixteen and eighteen American men in the couple of days since I'd arrived at Dallas Airport from London's Heathrow.
I'll speak more next time.
So this web-log is a refuge, but, obviously, I can't hide in it all the time. Accordingly there are long periods in every day when I consider the situation I and my men, Mikey, Squeaky, and Freddy, are in, and realize that the odds of us evading the American police for ever are small indeed. And not just the American police, but the British police, and the police in any country I and my men might escape to, for the police forces of the world work together. I know this from experience. I was, after all, in the highest echelons of the British security and diplomatic establishments.
But I've never lost hope that I'll escape being caught before I die. Being 113, this isn't impossible. But it is more impossible for Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, for they are mere forty-somethings. Until we have better ideas, we'll continue living in our underground home, which is the basement of a demolished house in an area quite hidden away in a city in Texas which I cannot name because the police may be reading this blog.
Today, I'll continue telling of the events of over a year ago, in 2007, which led to me and my men becoming outlaws in America. Last time, I told of our killing of Jimmy and his men at his house in eastern Texas, and the beginning of our drive south, during which we robbed a gun shop of much of its weaponry. I considered it prudent that, after we left the town where the gunshop was, we keep driving throughout that night.
This is what we did until sunrise. Seeing the sun's rays of morning made me acutely aware that I hadn’t slept all night. I realized how easily I could fall asleep at the wheel of our SUV, and wake up momentarily afterwards as it wrapped itself around a telegraph pole.
I and my men needed to sleep, but where? A motel so soon after we robbed the gun shop would be too risky. Under a bridge out of sight seemed best. I turned our SUV down a side-road and soon we passed over a bridge, not too big, not too small. It seemed perfect for four very tired men to sleep under for the rest of the day.
After we camouflaged the SUV, and carried down to under the bridge our stuff, which, for all intents and purposes was our guns - and also flashlights - for it could be night when we next emerged. We settled down to sleep.
The next thing I knew I was awake because I felt a hard blow on my head. It was dark, so I realized I had slept well into the night. A man was standing over me and beating me with a stick. While warding off the blows, I saw the outlines of other men who were beating Mikey Freddy and Squeaky as they lay on the ground. I hooked out my loaded Magnum .37, which I had strapped to my body, and I began firing at my assailant. Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, who had, on my orders, also strapped guns to themselves before sleeping, were soon firing too.
After some minutes all became quiet, for our attackers were lying on the ground. We turned our flashlights on them, and saw blood oozing through their clothes and from their heads. They were not moving and we assumed they were dead.
From how these men were dressed, and their overall physical appearance, I concluded they hadn’t attained the American Dream – a split-level suburban home, with two-car garage and a dog and a cat. They were obviously of that class of homeless and jobless men whom no-one would ask about for a long time if they disappeared.
What to do with the bodies? of which there were eight. We ruled out just leaving them, because this place might well be the home of yet more men, from whom the American Dream had escaped. They might, on encountering the bodies of their comrades, become upset and tell the police. We therefore loaded the bodies into our SUV, which I drove back on to the highway.
At this point I'll conclude this posting because writing about this incident has revived my anger at our being forced to kill even more men than the ones we'd already killed. It had made the case against us worse should the police ever catch us. These eight men, plus the eight to ten men we'd killed at Jimmy's house, meant we'd killed between sixteen and eighteen American men in the couple of days since I'd arrived at Dallas Airport from London's Heathrow.
I'll speak more next time.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Straight On Till Morning
It's December already. Christmas again approaches. Will I live to see it? for, at 113, I take nothing for granted. When much younger I tried to live life in day-tight compartments; then when older I cut this to hour-tight compartments; now, at 113, it's minute-tight compartments. This makes bearable my being forced to live as an outlaw in the basement of a demolished house in somewhere Texas, since I'm being sought by the police in all fifty states.
If I lived alone it would be difficult enough, but I have to share my underground home with my three surviving men, Mikey Squeaky and Freddy. This is especially difficult, since our states of mind are not always of the best, so we frequently quarrel. It hasn't yet come to fisticuffs but I fear this won't always be so. What if I get into fisticuffs with any of my so, so much younger men, and I get the worst of it? I would be dethroned as our leader, which would be humiliating.
I wish today to continue from where I left off last time, when I began to speak of the events of last year, 2007, which led to me and my men becoming outlaws in America. You will recall that we had killed Jimmy and his men during the knife and gun fight at Jimmy's house, which was in a small town in eastern Texas. Only after we had returned to our SUV and were driving away from the house and all the dead bodies did I fully realise the fix we were in.
If, dear reader, you have always lived the law-abiding respectable life, you still may not have grasped fully how dire our circumstances were. Consider that we were visitors to America, British citizens, and had just killed eight, maybe ten American citizens in the most gory manner, and had left behind the dead bodies of two of my men, whose bullet-shattered heads were beyond recognition. Think yourself in our place. Do you understand better now, mmmm?
That American officialdom would soon discover it was us was a given. Also, contemporary society with its reliance on credit cards and computers and all its state-of-the art surveillance technology, makes life for the modern outlaw especially difficult. Each time we, any of us, use a credit card or a computer, we advertise where we are and what we're doing.
For starters, then, we effectively had no money, since our credit cards would give us away. Therefore we would have to rob banks, so we needed better weaponry than we had, which was merely knives and rather ancient pistols. We had had the presence of mind to take with us some of the shotguns which Jimmy and his men, being dead, would no longer want. But shotguns, being large and unwieldy, draw undue attention when carried into a bank. The most modern of handguns were what we needed.
We began driving southwards from Jimmy's little town. After some miles we entered another little town on whose main street was a gun shop. We parked outside and walked in. We took out our pistols and pointed them at the clerk behind the counter and at the handful of other customers. I ordered them to lie face-down, hands behind head. Then we gathered up as many handguns as were feasible to take, plus ammunition and user manuals.
Sub-compacts, compacts, full-sized, specialized, .357 Magnums, .44 Magnums, .380 ACP’s, 9 mm’s, 10 mm’s, Barrettas, Springfields, Derringers, Smith & Wessons……..You name them, we took them, and by the boxload. I’ve always believed, you see, that if you do something, no matter what, do it well, whether tending to your garden, killing a man with a knife, or robbing a gun store or bank. Doing to the best of one’s ability whatever one does, was what my mater and pater inculcated into me. It has served me admirably all my life, and I see no reason to change.
Before we left with our acquisitions I emptied the cash from the till. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
Being in that gun shop, even for so brief a time, I became aware of how special America is, where the God-given right for any man to own as many guns as he wants is enshrined in the constitution. Nowhere but in America can an ordinary man visit a gun shop and be free to buy the gun or guns of his choice from the huge variety on offer. Semi-automatic pistols, service revolvers, six-shooters, pump-action shotguns, carbines, are there, waiting for a man to take home, to care for as lovingly as he would a dog or cat.
After we left the gun shop I drove our SUV down the town's main street till the end, then along an isolated side-road which led to some deserted ground with bushes. We hid there, and didn’t emerge until nearly midnight, whereupon I drove us all back into the town and pulled up near a used-car lot. We exchanged our SUV's plates with those of one of the cars in the lot, for the police would surely be alerted once the return-time of our rented SUV was overdue. As for the car-lot men, I felt confident it would be days, perhaps weeks, before they noticed the exchanged licence plate and informed police.
We continued southwards into the fathomless Texas night and kept going, sharing a fellowship of the highway with the long-distance truckers, those solitary men who haul their big rigs along the highways of America night and day, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the northern tundra to the Gulf of Mexico, from Boston Massachusetts to San Francisco California, from Fairbanks Alaska to El Paso Texas.
We didn’t stop till morning.
If I lived alone it would be difficult enough, but I have to share my underground home with my three surviving men, Mikey Squeaky and Freddy. This is especially difficult, since our states of mind are not always of the best, so we frequently quarrel. It hasn't yet come to fisticuffs but I fear this won't always be so. What if I get into fisticuffs with any of my so, so much younger men, and I get the worst of it? I would be dethroned as our leader, which would be humiliating.
I wish today to continue from where I left off last time, when I began to speak of the events of last year, 2007, which led to me and my men becoming outlaws in America. You will recall that we had killed Jimmy and his men during the knife and gun fight at Jimmy's house, which was in a small town in eastern Texas. Only after we had returned to our SUV and were driving away from the house and all the dead bodies did I fully realise the fix we were in.
If, dear reader, you have always lived the law-abiding respectable life, you still may not have grasped fully how dire our circumstances were. Consider that we were visitors to America, British citizens, and had just killed eight, maybe ten American citizens in the most gory manner, and had left behind the dead bodies of two of my men, whose bullet-shattered heads were beyond recognition. Think yourself in our place. Do you understand better now, mmmm?
That American officialdom would soon discover it was us was a given. Also, contemporary society with its reliance on credit cards and computers and all its state-of-the art surveillance technology, makes life for the modern outlaw especially difficult. Each time we, any of us, use a credit card or a computer, we advertise where we are and what we're doing.
For starters, then, we effectively had no money, since our credit cards would give us away. Therefore we would have to rob banks, so we needed better weaponry than we had, which was merely knives and rather ancient pistols. We had had the presence of mind to take with us some of the shotguns which Jimmy and his men, being dead, would no longer want. But shotguns, being large and unwieldy, draw undue attention when carried into a bank. The most modern of handguns were what we needed.
We began driving southwards from Jimmy's little town. After some miles we entered another little town on whose main street was a gun shop. We parked outside and walked in. We took out our pistols and pointed them at the clerk behind the counter and at the handful of other customers. I ordered them to lie face-down, hands behind head. Then we gathered up as many handguns as were feasible to take, plus ammunition and user manuals.
Sub-compacts, compacts, full-sized, specialized, .357 Magnums, .44 Magnums, .380 ACP’s, 9 mm’s, 10 mm’s, Barrettas, Springfields, Derringers, Smith & Wessons……..You name them, we took them, and by the boxload. I’ve always believed, you see, that if you do something, no matter what, do it well, whether tending to your garden, killing a man with a knife, or robbing a gun store or bank. Doing to the best of one’s ability whatever one does, was what my mater and pater inculcated into me. It has served me admirably all my life, and I see no reason to change.
Before we left with our acquisitions I emptied the cash from the till. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
Being in that gun shop, even for so brief a time, I became aware of how special America is, where the God-given right for any man to own as many guns as he wants is enshrined in the constitution. Nowhere but in America can an ordinary man visit a gun shop and be free to buy the gun or guns of his choice from the huge variety on offer. Semi-automatic pistols, service revolvers, six-shooters, pump-action shotguns, carbines, are there, waiting for a man to take home, to care for as lovingly as he would a dog or cat.
After we left the gun shop I drove our SUV down the town's main street till the end, then along an isolated side-road which led to some deserted ground with bushes. We hid there, and didn’t emerge until nearly midnight, whereupon I drove us all back into the town and pulled up near a used-car lot. We exchanged our SUV's plates with those of one of the cars in the lot, for the police would surely be alerted once the return-time of our rented SUV was overdue. As for the car-lot men, I felt confident it would be days, perhaps weeks, before they noticed the exchanged licence plate and informed police.
We continued southwards into the fathomless Texas night and kept going, sharing a fellowship of the highway with the long-distance truckers, those solitary men who haul their big rigs along the highways of America night and day, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the northern tundra to the Gulf of Mexico, from Boston Massachusetts to San Francisco California, from Fairbanks Alaska to El Paso Texas.
We didn’t stop till morning.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
The Party
You who are my faithful readers will know from what I've previously written, that, in the summer of last year, 2007, I had challenged to a duel or boxing match a reader of someone else's web-blog who had left comments on it which insulted Her Majesty the Queen of England. My challenge began a concatenation of events leading me to becoming an outlaw in America, hunted by the police in all fifty states.
The commenter had been an American, a Texan, with the non-de-plume of "Jimmy". Since I lived in England, I would, then, have to fly over the Atlantic Ocean to Texas in order to have a rendezvous with "Jimmy".
"Jimmy" didn't accept my challenge as such, merely leaving a comment on the above-mentioned web-log to say that were I and my men to enter his land, he and his men would blow our heads off with their guns. I knew where in Texas Jimmy lived, for I had men in America who were able to track down Jimmy's house, which I can reveal only that it was in a small town in eastern Texas. Accordingly I flew from Heathrow Airport in London to Dallas, which is a couple of hours driving from the town in question.
I was met at Dallas Airport by five of my men, Mikey Squeaky Freddy Scotty and Smithy, who had, on my orders, rented an SUV for us to drive to Jimmy's house. Normally I would have gone by myself, for I'm a man of honour, and believe in confronting my enemies alone, man-to-man. But because Jimmy had indicated in his last comment on the web-log that he had a number of men with him, I thought it prudent to bring some of my own men.
Each of us was armed with a pistol and knife, since we didn't quite know how Jimmy and his men would react when we arrived at his house and I called him out. I had also brought my whip with which to thrash Jimmy were he not to agree to a duel with pistols or a boxing match. So, in addition to the whip, I brought along two pairs of boxing gloves, for I couldn't be sure if Jimmy would have his own.
Finding Jimmy's house was surprisingly easy, since our SUV had one of those new-fangled direction finders with a voice which tells one where exactly to go. When first I heard it I nearly had a heart-attack, for it was so unexpected. I even looked around the SUV to see if anyone strange had been hiding inside it. Direction-finders with voices!! What next will you Americans think of?
Jimmy's house turned out a large one, with also a large garden in both front and back. Several pickup trucks were parked in the road in front and in the driveway. Obviously Jimmy had many men living in his house, or was holding a party. We parked our SUV across the road from Jimmy's, then I ordered my men to go into the garden and hide behind trees and bushes and cover me as I went to the front door.
I pounded on the door and shouted for Jimmy. The door opened and a man stood there, a seventyish man, small and bantam-like. I asked him if he was Jimmy and he nodded. He asked what my business was, and when I said I was Jeremy and had come to settle matters with him for insulting Her Majesty the Queen, Jimmy motioned to someone inside, then made way for a husky young man who pulled me into the house by my lapels. I flailed away with my fists but the husky young man wrestled me to the ground.
I concluded that my circumstances had become dire, so I pulled out a police-whistle I had hidden on my person, and blew it. This was the signal to my men to come to my aid. Immediately I heard shots fired and the shattering of glass. My men burst through the front windows and fighting began. The house was full of men - Jimmy's men I supposed - who obviously outnumbered us. The fighting was for the most part silent because I and my men had, in addition to our pistols, also brought knives, British Army knives, for, in close-order fighting there is still no substitute for the knife.
Knife-fighting is always messy at the best of times, so within seconds there was blood everywhere, most from from the gaping throats and gouged stomachs of Jimmy's men. My life being in danger, I quickly attuned once again to stabbing men, despite my last doing this in the trenches of France more than ninety years ago during the Great War. As for my men, they being former British Army commandos, stabbing men came as easy as eating shepherds pie.
But, this being America, and particularly Texas, guns eventually came into play. Those of Jimmy's men who were still alive after the first wave of fighting, began firing shotguns. As result, two of my men, Scotty and Smithy, were hit, and, judging by the blood and gore I saw spewing out of their shattered heads, they would have been dead before their bodies hit the floor. Fortunately we killed all the shotgun wielders before they killed more of us.
As soon as I adjudged Jimmy and his men to be all dead, I gave the order for us to leave the house. Speed was of the essence because neighbours might have heard the shotgun sounds, and have called the police. I would so have liked for us to take the bodies of Scotty and Smithy, in order to give them a decent and Christian burial. However, I concluded that to take the bodies would take too much time and therefore jeopardize our lives. I felt that Scotty and Smithy would have understood, and I felt better.
We sprinted to our SUV outside, and, with me at the wheel, it took us, with tires screeching, away for ever from Jimmy's house of carnage.
The commenter had been an American, a Texan, with the non-de-plume of "Jimmy". Since I lived in England, I would, then, have to fly over the Atlantic Ocean to Texas in order to have a rendezvous with "Jimmy".
"Jimmy" didn't accept my challenge as such, merely leaving a comment on the above-mentioned web-log to say that were I and my men to enter his land, he and his men would blow our heads off with their guns. I knew where in Texas Jimmy lived, for I had men in America who were able to track down Jimmy's house, which I can reveal only that it was in a small town in eastern Texas. Accordingly I flew from Heathrow Airport in London to Dallas, which is a couple of hours driving from the town in question.
I was met at Dallas Airport by five of my men, Mikey Squeaky Freddy Scotty and Smithy, who had, on my orders, rented an SUV for us to drive to Jimmy's house. Normally I would have gone by myself, for I'm a man of honour, and believe in confronting my enemies alone, man-to-man. But because Jimmy had indicated in his last comment on the web-log that he had a number of men with him, I thought it prudent to bring some of my own men.
Each of us was armed with a pistol and knife, since we didn't quite know how Jimmy and his men would react when we arrived at his house and I called him out. I had also brought my whip with which to thrash Jimmy were he not to agree to a duel with pistols or a boxing match. So, in addition to the whip, I brought along two pairs of boxing gloves, for I couldn't be sure if Jimmy would have his own.
Finding Jimmy's house was surprisingly easy, since our SUV had one of those new-fangled direction finders with a voice which tells one where exactly to go. When first I heard it I nearly had a heart-attack, for it was so unexpected. I even looked around the SUV to see if anyone strange had been hiding inside it. Direction-finders with voices!! What next will you Americans think of?
Jimmy's house turned out a large one, with also a large garden in both front and back. Several pickup trucks were parked in the road in front and in the driveway. Obviously Jimmy had many men living in his house, or was holding a party. We parked our SUV across the road from Jimmy's, then I ordered my men to go into the garden and hide behind trees and bushes and cover me as I went to the front door.
I pounded on the door and shouted for Jimmy. The door opened and a man stood there, a seventyish man, small and bantam-like. I asked him if he was Jimmy and he nodded. He asked what my business was, and when I said I was Jeremy and had come to settle matters with him for insulting Her Majesty the Queen, Jimmy motioned to someone inside, then made way for a husky young man who pulled me into the house by my lapels. I flailed away with my fists but the husky young man wrestled me to the ground.
I concluded that my circumstances had become dire, so I pulled out a police-whistle I had hidden on my person, and blew it. This was the signal to my men to come to my aid. Immediately I heard shots fired and the shattering of glass. My men burst through the front windows and fighting began. The house was full of men - Jimmy's men I supposed - who obviously outnumbered us. The fighting was for the most part silent because I and my men had, in addition to our pistols, also brought knives, British Army knives, for, in close-order fighting there is still no substitute for the knife.
Knife-fighting is always messy at the best of times, so within seconds there was blood everywhere, most from from the gaping throats and gouged stomachs of Jimmy's men. My life being in danger, I quickly attuned once again to stabbing men, despite my last doing this in the trenches of France more than ninety years ago during the Great War. As for my men, they being former British Army commandos, stabbing men came as easy as eating shepherds pie.
But, this being America, and particularly Texas, guns eventually came into play. Those of Jimmy's men who were still alive after the first wave of fighting, began firing shotguns. As result, two of my men, Scotty and Smithy, were hit, and, judging by the blood and gore I saw spewing out of their shattered heads, they would have been dead before their bodies hit the floor. Fortunately we killed all the shotgun wielders before they killed more of us.
As soon as I adjudged Jimmy and his men to be all dead, I gave the order for us to leave the house. Speed was of the essence because neighbours might have heard the shotgun sounds, and have called the police. I would so have liked for us to take the bodies of Scotty and Smithy, in order to give them a decent and Christian burial. However, I concluded that to take the bodies would take too much time and therefore jeopardize our lives. I felt that Scotty and Smithy would have understood, and I felt better.
We sprinted to our SUV outside, and, with me at the wheel, it took us, with tires screeching, away for ever from Jimmy's house of carnage.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
On Being God
I will today speak of the beginning of the concatenation of events which led me to become an outlaw in America, hunted by the police in all fifty states. With each passing day I feel more and more that I must record for posterity all which has happened, for, at 113 years of age, I can never know which breath will be my last, when I'll be dispatched to my Eternal Reward.
It's not that I feel I may momentarily be dispatched to my Eternal Reward, since I keep in excellent shape by working out regularly, and I eat healthily - salads, tofu, fish, and all of that. No, it's that, statistically, I've been living on borrowed time since I was three-score-and-ten, some forty-three years ago. I'm dreadfully afraid of dying, although I've courted death most of my life, for I fought as a soldier in both world wars, and throughout the British Empire, helping put down the periodic insurrections of the natives who failed to see the benefits of British rule.
Many, many times I've been shot at, but somehow the bullets missed, except the one which felled me on the Somme in 1916, but I survived that. Then a year and a half ago, at the stage of life when I could expect to live more sedately, I became an outlaw in America, a situation I brought about. It's as if I have a death-wish, for being an outlaw is dangerous, believe you me.
I wonder, though, whether my great age is because God wants me to live an especially long life. So whenever I've been about to - how shall I say - snuff it, He stepped in and and saved me. So perhaps He'll arrange it so I get out of the mess I'm in and return to my little home in dear old England.
On the other hand, God may have arranged that I get into this mess, in order that the experience inwardly strengthen me for the further things He has planned for me on earth. Thus my travails may be in a Higher Cause. Perhaps that Higher Cause is this web-log, which future generations will regard in the same light as Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, or Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That - to become a work which will be another jewel in mankind's crown.
Perhaps I am God, who chose to become a man just to experience what it's like. And part of that experience is not to know I'm God, and to expect to die when I become old, thereafter to be merely rotting bones in the ground. But, in fact, when I die, I'll simply go back to being God. Thus I'm immortal and can do just what I like.
I see I've digressed, for I had intended to speak of the beginning of the concatenation of events which led me to become an outlaw in America, hunted by the police in all fifty states. But I've gone on long enough.
Perhaps next time...........
It's not that I feel I may momentarily be dispatched to my Eternal Reward, since I keep in excellent shape by working out regularly, and I eat healthily - salads, tofu, fish, and all of that. No, it's that, statistically, I've been living on borrowed time since I was three-score-and-ten, some forty-three years ago. I'm dreadfully afraid of dying, although I've courted death most of my life, for I fought as a soldier in both world wars, and throughout the British Empire, helping put down the periodic insurrections of the natives who failed to see the benefits of British rule.
Many, many times I've been shot at, but somehow the bullets missed, except the one which felled me on the Somme in 1916, but I survived that. Then a year and a half ago, at the stage of life when I could expect to live more sedately, I became an outlaw in America, a situation I brought about. It's as if I have a death-wish, for being an outlaw is dangerous, believe you me.
I wonder, though, whether my great age is because God wants me to live an especially long life. So whenever I've been about to - how shall I say - snuff it, He stepped in and and saved me. So perhaps He'll arrange it so I get out of the mess I'm in and return to my little home in dear old England.
On the other hand, God may have arranged that I get into this mess, in order that the experience inwardly strengthen me for the further things He has planned for me on earth. Thus my travails may be in a Higher Cause. Perhaps that Higher Cause is this web-log, which future generations will regard in the same light as Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, or Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That - to become a work which will be another jewel in mankind's crown.
Perhaps I am God, who chose to become a man just to experience what it's like. And part of that experience is not to know I'm God, and to expect to die when I become old, thereafter to be merely rotting bones in the ground. But, in fact, when I die, I'll simply go back to being God. Thus I'm immortal and can do just what I like.
I see I've digressed, for I had intended to speak of the beginning of the concatenation of events which led me to become an outlaw in America, hunted by the police in all fifty states. But I've gone on long enough.
Perhaps next time...........
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Charley-Boy
I should like today to deliver myself of further remarks about the English Royal Family, for I'm concerned about the fate of the Monarchy when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth finally goes to her Eternal Reward. My concern centres around her oldest son, Prince Charles, who is so pathetic a figure that each time I say or write the name "Prince Charles" I get pains in my stomach. So, for the purposes of today's posting, I have little alternative than to refer to him as Charley-Boy.
Should Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ever click into this blog and read what I'll write today, I hope she'll understand why I'm referring to her oldest son as Charley-Boy, for if Her Majesty is as kind a person as I believe she is, she wouldn't want me, an old man of 113, to experience stomach pains unnecessarily.
With each passing day my reverence for Her Majesty increases, for she is all that stands between us and the forces of godless nihilism, whose mouthpiece is that socialist rag, The Guardian, which would impose a republic on England, our Sceptred Isle, our Green and Pleasant Land.
Once Her Majesty goes to her Eternal Reward I fear the game will be up for our Monarchy, for Charley-Boy just won’t cut it as king. We can’t have a king who talks to plants and isn’t man enough to sire children, for it should be obvious to all that Charley-Boy isn’t the biological father of the two boys his late wife bore. Add to this that Charley-Boy is - not to put too fine a point on it - unspeakably ugly. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone uglier throughout my 113 years. To have a king as ugly as Charley-Boy would make us English the laughing-stock of the world.
So when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth does finally go to her Eternal Reward, it may be the moment for us English to change to another ruling family, since the Windsors have been around so long they’ve become quite inbred, and so are no longer too bright. Other family lines within the English aristocracy have, in fact, been contemplated, but no one has had the temerity to suggest a royal family line from one of the many countries of the Commonwealth. This is quite extraordinary, since the Queen of England is also the head of the Commonwealth.
I realise, of course, that for me to suggest a non-English royal family to rule England, might be regarded as treasonous by some of you, my readers, especially if you are a Little-Englander. But, I ask you, when last was England ruled by a Royal Family which was English? You should remember that the current English Royal Family is German - the House of Windsor being in reality the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. This was such a mouthful that the name was changed to the much more manageable "Windsor".
So for me, the prospect of our future royal family coming somewhere from within our quondam Empire, called today the Commonwealth, is - in the parlance of you Americans - no "Big Deal". Although 113, I am at heart still a young man, a man with my fingers on the Zeitgeist. I therefore embrace the new technologies like the laptop computer, which has enabled me to create this blog which you are reading. Men like me, with their fingers on the Zeitgeist, are able quite easily - in another phrase of you Americans - to "think outside the box". And what could be more "outside the box" than for the future English Royal Family to come from the Commonwealth?
A leading country in the Commonwealth, South Africa, has, for instance, the Zulu royal family, whose head, Goodwill Zwelethini, is king of the Zulu nation. King Goodwill was born in 1948, the same year as Charley-Boy, but, unlike Charley-Boy, is actually a king, not just a prince, and moreover has been a king for over thirty-five years. King Goodwill Zwelethini is therefore most experienced in the arts of kingship, and so would be ideal to be installed as King of England and the Commonwealth when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth departs from us forever.
King Goodwill has twenty-seven sons and daughters, so there would always be a potential heir to the English throne should any pre-decease their father. And the King and his family like to spend money generously, as any self-respecting Royals should. For instance the Zulu royals, in 2006, spent over $123,000 on buying luxury motor cars alone.
King Goodwill Zwelethini of England and the Commonwealth. It is an idea whose time has come.
Should Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ever click into this blog and read what I'll write today, I hope she'll understand why I'm referring to her oldest son as Charley-Boy, for if Her Majesty is as kind a person as I believe she is, she wouldn't want me, an old man of 113, to experience stomach pains unnecessarily.
With each passing day my reverence for Her Majesty increases, for she is all that stands between us and the forces of godless nihilism, whose mouthpiece is that socialist rag, The Guardian, which would impose a republic on England, our Sceptred Isle, our Green and Pleasant Land.
Once Her Majesty goes to her Eternal Reward I fear the game will be up for our Monarchy, for Charley-Boy just won’t cut it as king. We can’t have a king who talks to plants and isn’t man enough to sire children, for it should be obvious to all that Charley-Boy isn’t the biological father of the two boys his late wife bore. Add to this that Charley-Boy is - not to put too fine a point on it - unspeakably ugly. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone uglier throughout my 113 years. To have a king as ugly as Charley-Boy would make us English the laughing-stock of the world.
So when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth does finally go to her Eternal Reward, it may be the moment for us English to change to another ruling family, since the Windsors have been around so long they’ve become quite inbred, and so are no longer too bright. Other family lines within the English aristocracy have, in fact, been contemplated, but no one has had the temerity to suggest a royal family line from one of the many countries of the Commonwealth. This is quite extraordinary, since the Queen of England is also the head of the Commonwealth.
I realise, of course, that for me to suggest a non-English royal family to rule England, might be regarded as treasonous by some of you, my readers, especially if you are a Little-Englander. But, I ask you, when last was England ruled by a Royal Family which was English? You should remember that the current English Royal Family is German - the House of Windsor being in reality the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. This was such a mouthful that the name was changed to the much more manageable "Windsor".
So for me, the prospect of our future royal family coming somewhere from within our quondam Empire, called today the Commonwealth, is - in the parlance of you Americans - no "Big Deal". Although 113, I am at heart still a young man, a man with my fingers on the Zeitgeist. I therefore embrace the new technologies like the laptop computer, which has enabled me to create this blog which you are reading. Men like me, with their fingers on the Zeitgeist, are able quite easily - in another phrase of you Americans - to "think outside the box". And what could be more "outside the box" than for the future English Royal Family to come from the Commonwealth?
A leading country in the Commonwealth, South Africa, has, for instance, the Zulu royal family, whose head, Goodwill Zwelethini, is king of the Zulu nation. King Goodwill was born in 1948, the same year as Charley-Boy, but, unlike Charley-Boy, is actually a king, not just a prince, and moreover has been a king for over thirty-five years. King Goodwill Zwelethini is therefore most experienced in the arts of kingship, and so would be ideal to be installed as King of England and the Commonwealth when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth departs from us forever.
King Goodwill has twenty-seven sons and daughters, so there would always be a potential heir to the English throne should any pre-decease their father. And the King and his family like to spend money generously, as any self-respecting Royals should. For instance the Zulu royals, in 2006, spent over $123,000 on buying luxury motor cars alone.
King Goodwill Zwelethini of England and the Commonwealth. It is an idea whose time has come.
Friday, November 21, 2008
There'll Always Be An England
I wish today to speak of "my men", for, from what I've written of them in previous postings, they must seem to you, my readers, rather mysterious. In my last posting but one, for instance, I spoke of having "men" in the USA who would track down where in Texas Jimmy lived, so that I might confront him man-to-man because of his insulting comments about the English Royal Family, who have always been as much a part of me as my heart and my soul.
For anyone to insult Her Majesty the Queen, is to insult me, and, as a loyal Englishman, I have no recourse but to call them out. Pavlovian? Quite possibly, but there it is.
The longer I'm forced to live underground in Texas, hiding out from the American police who are looking for me in all fifty states, the more I hold The Royal Family to my heart, for I feel that as long as there is a Royal Family, all is not lost, that there'll always be an England. Each evening after supper in our cramped and dusty underground home, I and the three of my men - Mikey Squeaky and Freddy - who share it with me, sing English songs which stir our hearts, like "We'll Meet Again", "Jerusalem", and, yes, "There'll Always Be An England". But, be assured, we never forget to sing at the end, "God Save The Queen".
Getting back now to "my men", Mikey Squeaky and Freddy are not the only ones of "my men", for I have a number of them in both England and America. I use them for odd jobs like tracking down those who insult Her Majesty the Queen, and, for a fee, I refer them to third parties who need fit and trained men to do dangerous work like guarding rich businessmen against being kidnapped ; and I refer them to certain foreign governments who need mercenary soldiers to keep their restive peoples in order.
I'll explain that, as a British Army General who served the Empire all over the world, and who served in the British diplomatic corps as military attache in many foreign capitals, including Washington, I established important contacts worldwide. When I retired, I maintained these contacts, since many needed trained free-lance men to do clandestine and dirty work, and I, as a former general, knew of many, many former British Army men who needed work, and who would suit my contacts admirably. The fees I earned for my referrals supplemented nicely my military pension.
However, my being on the run in America, has affected greatly my ability to refer suitable men to my contacts, since I must keep my whereabouts secret. Hence most of my men have gone on to greener pastures. But a handful, like Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, have stuck with me out of honour, and for other reasons which will become clear in my future postings.
For anyone to insult Her Majesty the Queen, is to insult me, and, as a loyal Englishman, I have no recourse but to call them out. Pavlovian? Quite possibly, but there it is.
The longer I'm forced to live underground in Texas, hiding out from the American police who are looking for me in all fifty states, the more I hold The Royal Family to my heart, for I feel that as long as there is a Royal Family, all is not lost, that there'll always be an England. Each evening after supper in our cramped and dusty underground home, I and the three of my men - Mikey Squeaky and Freddy - who share it with me, sing English songs which stir our hearts, like "We'll Meet Again", "Jerusalem", and, yes, "There'll Always Be An England". But, be assured, we never forget to sing at the end, "God Save The Queen".
Getting back now to "my men", Mikey Squeaky and Freddy are not the only ones of "my men", for I have a number of them in both England and America. I use them for odd jobs like tracking down those who insult Her Majesty the Queen, and, for a fee, I refer them to third parties who need fit and trained men to do dangerous work like guarding rich businessmen against being kidnapped ; and I refer them to certain foreign governments who need mercenary soldiers to keep their restive peoples in order.
I'll explain that, as a British Army General who served the Empire all over the world, and who served in the British diplomatic corps as military attache in many foreign capitals, including Washington, I established important contacts worldwide. When I retired, I maintained these contacts, since many needed trained free-lance men to do clandestine and dirty work, and I, as a former general, knew of many, many former British Army men who needed work, and who would suit my contacts admirably. The fees I earned for my referrals supplemented nicely my military pension.
However, my being on the run in America, has affected greatly my ability to refer suitable men to my contacts, since I must keep my whereabouts secret. Hence most of my men have gone on to greener pastures. But a handful, like Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, have stuck with me out of honour, and for other reasons which will become clear in my future postings.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
King Edward The Seventh
On my last posting I spoke of my reading on someone's blog a piece on King Edward the Seventh, and the acrimonious exchange in the comments section I had with another reader, "Jimmy", an American from Texas, who suggested we English rid ourselves of our monarchy and get a president, just like in America.
This acted like a trip-wire setting off an explosive inside me. So I let "Jimmy" have it in the comment I posted in response, since, for a foreigner to insult our monarchy is to insult me. As a loyal Englishman, I could do no less than demand that Jimmy apologise, and if he didn't, to demand satisfaction in the form of a boxing match or a duel with swords or pistols, otherwise I would seek Jimmy out and thrash him with my whip.
I do now realise that I acted impulsively, for my response set off the chain of events which has led me to become a hunted man in America, wanted by the police in all fifty states, and being forced to live like a rat underground in the basement of a demolished house in a city in Texas, the name of which I must keep secret for my personal safety.
The blogging piece on King Edward the Seventh being what began it all, I think it only fair to reproduce it in this posting, to put you more in the picture. So here it is:
***
"Across the wires, the electric message came: ‘He is no better; he is much the same’".
These lines, as good an example as any of bad poetry, were written in November 1871 by Alfred Austin, the English Poet Laureate of the time, inspired by the serious illness, from typhoid fever, of the future King Edward VII when still Prince of Wales. This information I gleaned from Christopher Hibbert’s book, “Edward VII”.
Edward was the second child, and eldest son, of Queen Victoria. His older sister Victoria, the Princess Royal, became the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. But we are getting ahead of our story.
Edward had an exacting upbringing. For six hours each day he was instructed in social economy, chemistry, algebra, and geometry. He was required to read the masterpieces of English, French, and German literature, and to write essays in these three languages on historical and biographical themes. He was also required to draw maps, master Latin, talk to famous scientists, and learn political economy. He was also taught riding, gymnastics, dancing, military exercises, skating, swimming, croquet, forestry, farming, carpentry, and bricklaying.
Such a regimen would have taxed the capacities of the most intelligent of children. Edward’s problem was that he wasn’t particularly intelligent and not at all intellectual – sort of like George Bush. It wasn’t that Edward was stupid; it was just that he was very ordinary. He lived in fear of his father, and doesn’t appear to have been much liked by his mother who said of him, much later on, that she never could or would look at him without a shudder.
Edward’s older sister by just a year, was, on the contrary, most intelligent and quick witted, and was the favourite child of her parents, Victoria and Albert. So it should not have come as a surprise that the young Edward frequently sought relief in outbursts of furious violence.
Once his boyhood years were over and his formal education ended, Edward had more time to do the things he liked, like having a good time. Even today, his name is associated with having a good time. Edward rode to the hounds, shot, drank, partied, gambled, gambolled, travelled, and had affairs with many women, including, most famously, Jennie Jerome, the glamorous mother of Winston Churchill.
Paradoxically, his marriage to Alexandra appears to have been harmonious, if not happy. She obviously knew of Edward’s many amorous liaisons, but she took them in her stride. His favourite mistress in later life was a Mrs Keppel. So tolerant was Alexandra, the queen, that when Edward was on his deathbed, she summoned Mrs Keppel to be at his bedside.
Edward was sixty when he became King of England – having waited an unusually long time. So, in the meantime, what else could he do but have a good time. His mother, Queen Victoria, had excluded him from the affairs of state, since she just didn’t like him. Besides, she wouldn’t have considered him up to the job. He didn’t, after all, read or engage in any intellectual pursuits, and he was becoming a public embarrassment because of his notorious womanizing, being named in not a few high-profile divorce suits.
Sometimes when in public he was booed, and there was consequent talk in high circles of England becoming a republic. Thus, Edward’s serious illness in 1871 was fortuitous, since it diverted attention from all the controversies surrounding him, while the citizenry prayed for his recovery.
But Edward, on assuming the kingship, became generally well-liked and respected, since he was sociable and not a snob - indeed, his mother had frowned upon many of his friends. But he stood on ceremony when people unknown to him became too familiar or took him for granted. And he embarked on his kingly duties with great zest, energy, and enthusiasm. He got rid of much of the detritus mouldering in Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, and travelled around making speeches, laying foundation stones, and meeting the people. He resumed the practise - which his mother had abandoned - of reading the annual speech to parliament, setting out the government’s agenda.
Being sociable and a good public speaker, Edward was a definite asset for imperial Britain when he had to meet and schmooze with other heads of state, whether kings or presidents. One such was his headstrong nephew, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm, with whom Edward had many trying encounters. It was to Edward’s credit that he was able to deal with Wilhelm as well as he did.
Edward reigned only nine years before succumbing to heart problems – not surprising given his 240 lbs on a 5ft 7ins frame, the legacy of prodigious eating and drinking - and being a smoker to boot. He had been an anomaly – his libertine ways contrasting piquantly with the official puritanism of his mother’s reign, and with the prim and proper ways of his own son, King George V, who succeeded him. Edward’s reign was, indeed, like a morsel between two crusts of bread.
Despite his short reign, Edward’s stature as British monarch was such that his funeral in 1910, marked, in the words of Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August “……the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place, and, of its kind, the last...…”.
Edward’s legacy exists even today. If, for instance, you smoke cigars, it’s entirely possible you’ve smoked one called the King Edward Cigar, which is named after him. And if for Sunday lunch, you habitually tuck into roast beef, roast potatoes, horseradish sauce and Yorkshire pudding, you wouldn’t be doing so but for Edward, who introduced the practice of eating this meal on Sundays.
***
A mediocre piece, typical of the blogosphere, I'm sure you'll agree. Had I never come across it, I'd still be living in my little rustic house in England instead of underground as a hunted rat in Texas. Oh, oh, how foolish I've been.
My only solace is that, assuming an infinite universe, there is a world identical to ours out there somewhere, where there is a man identical to me, having lived an identical (or parallel) life, but only to the point just before the above piece about King Edward appeared. Thereafter our parallel lives diverged, so that this other "me" is still living in a rustic house in England.
And regarding parallel lives, you may, dear reader, have noticed parallels between King Edward the Seventh and his great-great grandson Prince Charles, who, too, will be quite old - probably very old - when he becomes King of England. The reign of the future King Charles will, too, follow that of his mother, not father. Charles appears, too, not to be liked by his mother, and, too, grew up in fear of his father (Prince Phillip) who, reportedly, can’t stand the sight of him. Charles, too, has raised eyebrows through several romantic liaisons over the years, and, too, had a married woman for a mistress.
Charles’s former mistress, now wife, Camilla, is a great granddaughter of Edward’s mistress, Mrs Keppel. And, too, there is continuing talk – particularly among readers of that socialist rag, The Guardian - of Britain becoming a republic, because it's feared the future king won’t be up to the job.
Charles' mother, Queen Elizabeth, probably knows this too, which is why she won’t abdicate, and so continues to do her tiring royal duties despite that she could so easily delegate them to her worthless son.
This acted like a trip-wire setting off an explosive inside me. So I let "Jimmy" have it in the comment I posted in response, since, for a foreigner to insult our monarchy is to insult me. As a loyal Englishman, I could do no less than demand that Jimmy apologise, and if he didn't, to demand satisfaction in the form of a boxing match or a duel with swords or pistols, otherwise I would seek Jimmy out and thrash him with my whip.
I do now realise that I acted impulsively, for my response set off the chain of events which has led me to become a hunted man in America, wanted by the police in all fifty states, and being forced to live like a rat underground in the basement of a demolished house in a city in Texas, the name of which I must keep secret for my personal safety.
The blogging piece on King Edward the Seventh being what began it all, I think it only fair to reproduce it in this posting, to put you more in the picture. So here it is:
***
"Across the wires, the electric message came: ‘He is no better; he is much the same’".
These lines, as good an example as any of bad poetry, were written in November 1871 by Alfred Austin, the English Poet Laureate of the time, inspired by the serious illness, from typhoid fever, of the future King Edward VII when still Prince of Wales. This information I gleaned from Christopher Hibbert’s book, “Edward VII”.
Edward was the second child, and eldest son, of Queen Victoria. His older sister Victoria, the Princess Royal, became the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. But we are getting ahead of our story.
Edward had an exacting upbringing. For six hours each day he was instructed in social economy, chemistry, algebra, and geometry. He was required to read the masterpieces of English, French, and German literature, and to write essays in these three languages on historical and biographical themes. He was also required to draw maps, master Latin, talk to famous scientists, and learn political economy. He was also taught riding, gymnastics, dancing, military exercises, skating, swimming, croquet, forestry, farming, carpentry, and bricklaying.
Such a regimen would have taxed the capacities of the most intelligent of children. Edward’s problem was that he wasn’t particularly intelligent and not at all intellectual – sort of like George Bush. It wasn’t that Edward was stupid; it was just that he was very ordinary. He lived in fear of his father, and doesn’t appear to have been much liked by his mother who said of him, much later on, that she never could or would look at him without a shudder.
Edward’s older sister by just a year, was, on the contrary, most intelligent and quick witted, and was the favourite child of her parents, Victoria and Albert. So it should not have come as a surprise that the young Edward frequently sought relief in outbursts of furious violence.
Once his boyhood years were over and his formal education ended, Edward had more time to do the things he liked, like having a good time. Even today, his name is associated with having a good time. Edward rode to the hounds, shot, drank, partied, gambled, gambolled, travelled, and had affairs with many women, including, most famously, Jennie Jerome, the glamorous mother of Winston Churchill.
Paradoxically, his marriage to Alexandra appears to have been harmonious, if not happy. She obviously knew of Edward’s many amorous liaisons, but she took them in her stride. His favourite mistress in later life was a Mrs Keppel. So tolerant was Alexandra, the queen, that when Edward was on his deathbed, she summoned Mrs Keppel to be at his bedside.
Edward was sixty when he became King of England – having waited an unusually long time. So, in the meantime, what else could he do but have a good time. His mother, Queen Victoria, had excluded him from the affairs of state, since she just didn’t like him. Besides, she wouldn’t have considered him up to the job. He didn’t, after all, read or engage in any intellectual pursuits, and he was becoming a public embarrassment because of his notorious womanizing, being named in not a few high-profile divorce suits.
Sometimes when in public he was booed, and there was consequent talk in high circles of England becoming a republic. Thus, Edward’s serious illness in 1871 was fortuitous, since it diverted attention from all the controversies surrounding him, while the citizenry prayed for his recovery.
But Edward, on assuming the kingship, became generally well-liked and respected, since he was sociable and not a snob - indeed, his mother had frowned upon many of his friends. But he stood on ceremony when people unknown to him became too familiar or took him for granted. And he embarked on his kingly duties with great zest, energy, and enthusiasm. He got rid of much of the detritus mouldering in Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, and travelled around making speeches, laying foundation stones, and meeting the people. He resumed the practise - which his mother had abandoned - of reading the annual speech to parliament, setting out the government’s agenda.
Being sociable and a good public speaker, Edward was a definite asset for imperial Britain when he had to meet and schmooze with other heads of state, whether kings or presidents. One such was his headstrong nephew, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm, with whom Edward had many trying encounters. It was to Edward’s credit that he was able to deal with Wilhelm as well as he did.
Edward reigned only nine years before succumbing to heart problems – not surprising given his 240 lbs on a 5ft 7ins frame, the legacy of prodigious eating and drinking - and being a smoker to boot. He had been an anomaly – his libertine ways contrasting piquantly with the official puritanism of his mother’s reign, and with the prim and proper ways of his own son, King George V, who succeeded him. Edward’s reign was, indeed, like a morsel between two crusts of bread.
Despite his short reign, Edward’s stature as British monarch was such that his funeral in 1910, marked, in the words of Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August “……the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place, and, of its kind, the last...…”.
Edward’s legacy exists even today. If, for instance, you smoke cigars, it’s entirely possible you’ve smoked one called the King Edward Cigar, which is named after him. And if for Sunday lunch, you habitually tuck into roast beef, roast potatoes, horseradish sauce and Yorkshire pudding, you wouldn’t be doing so but for Edward, who introduced the practice of eating this meal on Sundays.
***
A mediocre piece, typical of the blogosphere, I'm sure you'll agree. Had I never come across it, I'd still be living in my little rustic house in England instead of underground as a hunted rat in Texas. Oh, oh, how foolish I've been.
My only solace is that, assuming an infinite universe, there is a world identical to ours out there somewhere, where there is a man identical to me, having lived an identical (or parallel) life, but only to the point just before the above piece about King Edward appeared. Thereafter our parallel lives diverged, so that this other "me" is still living in a rustic house in England.
And regarding parallel lives, you may, dear reader, have noticed parallels between King Edward the Seventh and his great-great grandson Prince Charles, who, too, will be quite old - probably very old - when he becomes King of England. The reign of the future King Charles will, too, follow that of his mother, not father. Charles appears, too, not to be liked by his mother, and, too, grew up in fear of his father (Prince Phillip) who, reportedly, can’t stand the sight of him. Charles, too, has raised eyebrows through several romantic liaisons over the years, and, too, had a married woman for a mistress.
Charles’s former mistress, now wife, Camilla, is a great granddaughter of Edward’s mistress, Mrs Keppel. And, too, there is continuing talk – particularly among readers of that socialist rag, The Guardian - of Britain becoming a republic, because it's feared the future king won’t be up to the job.
Charles' mother, Queen Elizabeth, probably knows this too, which is why she won’t abdicate, and so continues to do her tiring royal duties despite that she could so easily delegate them to her worthless son.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Bells Across The Meadows
Each morning when I emerge from my underground home - which, if you'll remember, is the basement of a demolished house in a disused lot in somewhere Texas - I curse myself for my hot-headedness, for it is why I'm forced to live here. I could so easily still be living in my cottage in the south of England, sitting at my desk in my study, looking out over mist-covered meadows and grazing sheep, hearing the faint chimes of bells from the village church.
Will I ever again see my dear little home in my beloved England? I mustn't dwell more on this right now, for I'm beginning to weep.
My journey into the abyss began more than a year ago when I read a piece on someone's blog about King Edward the Seventh. If you who are reading this are American, you should know that King Edward the Seventh was King of England from 1903 to 1911. I'll reveal that I, when a boy of ten or eleven, once saw King Edward at a gathering my pater had taken me to. Yes, I remember so well seeing His Majesty King Edward, for it was as if I were seeing God, for, when I was a boy, we English regarded our King with the awe that you Americans today regard your president.
It's important you understand this, for you'll better appreciate how I felt when I read a comment from a reader of the aforementioned blogging piece on King Edward, who wrote:
Ah thaynk that havin’ uh monarchy is stoopid. Ah mean, no-one eelec-ted them, an’ they jus’ sit aroun’ awl day in thayre castles drinkin' tea an’ doin' nuthin’ while thuh hard workin’ Brit taxpayers pay fer thayre upkeep.
Thuh Brits should jus’ get ridda thayre queen an’ get uh pres’dent like we hav’ in thuh Yew Nited States.
Jimmy.
Aside from its gross insult to our monarchy in the person of Her Majesty the Queen, the comment was written, as I'm sure you'll agree, in atrocious English. The commenter obviously hadn't graduated from high school, for I feel sure even American high schools don't graduate pupils who write English as badly as this.
However badly the comment was written, I couldn't allow it to go unanswered, so I left the following comment:
To "Jimmy", or whoever you are.
How dare you, Sir, suggest Great Britain give up its monarchy and become a republic like the United States. I’ll have you know, Sir, that you are a scoundrel and blackguard, for your suggestion is not only an insult to Her Majesty the Queen, but also to me, as a loyal subject of Her Majesty.
Therefore, Sir, on behalf of Her Majesty, I demand an apology for this outrageous insult, and I want it within three days. Failing an apology I will have no alternative but to call you out and demand satisfaction in the form of a duel, or boxing match under the Queensberry rules. I’ll leave the choice of engagement to you.
If you wish for a duel, you may choose either pistols or swords, and you may also choose the venue. If you wish to box me under the Queensberry rules, I should warn you that I was middleweight boxing champion of the British Army in 1946, and can still throw as good a left jab as anyone.
But, if you'll apologise, Sir, I'll take this no further.
But should I not receive an apology, or you don’t agree to a duel or boxing match, I will gather up my my whip, fly down to wherever it is you live, and personally thrash you. And it is no use you hiding, for my men will track you down. The choice, Sir, is yours. Three days, or else.
Jeremy.
Over the next few hours I kept checking in at the blogging site in question, but there was no reply to my challenge. So I left another comment, saying I was still waiting, and that "Jimmy" must act like a man and respond appropriately.
After clicking in to the blogging site for the umpteenth time, I at last saw "Jimmy's" response, which said:
Ter Jeremy - Yew should know that as uh citizen of thuh Yew Nited States ah am permitted ter say whawt ah wawnt under thuh first amend-ment of thuh Amer'can const’tootion.
An’ yew should know that if yew or any of yer boys put one step on mah land, me an’ mah own boys will be waitin’ fer yew with our shotguns, an’ we will blow yer heads off. So if yew an’ yer boys wawnt ter hav' yer heads blown off, why, yew jus’ mosey right awn over.
Jimmy.
I replied thus:
To Jimmy - Sir, you may well have the right to say what you please under your constitution, but I also have the right to call you out for satisfaction when you insult the British monarchy.
In your answer, it seems to me clear, Sir, that you don’t wish to face me alone, man to man, thereby confirming that you are an unmanly coward. As I write this, it is slightly over 24 hours until my deadline expires for your unequivocal apology to me for your damnable insult to Her Majesty the Queen.
I should now inform you, Sir, that those of my men in the United States have already ascertained where you live in Texas. Failing your apology, or acceptance for a duel or boxing match, they will, on the expiry of the deadline, proceed to take out your men.
I should also tell you that my men were commandos in the British Army, and who now work for me whenever I have need of them. Their training is such that they will have no trouble in neutralising your men.
I have already booked a flight to Texas, and will be there inside 24 hours. Once my men have taken out yours, they will give me the signal. Whereupon I will proceed to your abode to administer to you, Sir, with my leather whip, the thrashing you so clearly deserve.
However, you still have 24 hours to come to your senses.
If you wish still to apologise, or accept my challenge to a duel or boxing match, you need only indicate this on this blogging site, since I will be monitoring it each hour until then, even during my flight to Texas, because I will have my laptop with me on the plane. But if you know what is good for you, Sir, you will apologise.
Jeremy.
This posting has gone on long enough. I'll continue it next time.
Will I ever again see my dear little home in my beloved England? I mustn't dwell more on this right now, for I'm beginning to weep.
My journey into the abyss began more than a year ago when I read a piece on someone's blog about King Edward the Seventh. If you who are reading this are American, you should know that King Edward the Seventh was King of England from 1903 to 1911. I'll reveal that I, when a boy of ten or eleven, once saw King Edward at a gathering my pater had taken me to. Yes, I remember so well seeing His Majesty King Edward, for it was as if I were seeing God, for, when I was a boy, we English regarded our King with the awe that you Americans today regard your president.
It's important you understand this, for you'll better appreciate how I felt when I read a comment from a reader of the aforementioned blogging piece on King Edward, who wrote:
Ah thaynk that havin’ uh monarchy is stoopid. Ah mean, no-one eelec-ted them, an’ they jus’ sit aroun’ awl day in thayre castles drinkin' tea an’ doin' nuthin’ while thuh hard workin’ Brit taxpayers pay fer thayre upkeep.
Thuh Brits should jus’ get ridda thayre queen an’ get uh pres’dent like we hav’ in thuh Yew Nited States.
Jimmy.
Aside from its gross insult to our monarchy in the person of Her Majesty the Queen, the comment was written, as I'm sure you'll agree, in atrocious English. The commenter obviously hadn't graduated from high school, for I feel sure even American high schools don't graduate pupils who write English as badly as this.
However badly the comment was written, I couldn't allow it to go unanswered, so I left the following comment:
To "Jimmy", or whoever you are.
How dare you, Sir, suggest Great Britain give up its monarchy and become a republic like the United States. I’ll have you know, Sir, that you are a scoundrel and blackguard, for your suggestion is not only an insult to Her Majesty the Queen, but also to me, as a loyal subject of Her Majesty.
Therefore, Sir, on behalf of Her Majesty, I demand an apology for this outrageous insult, and I want it within three days. Failing an apology I will have no alternative but to call you out and demand satisfaction in the form of a duel, or boxing match under the Queensberry rules. I’ll leave the choice of engagement to you.
If you wish for a duel, you may choose either pistols or swords, and you may also choose the venue. If you wish to box me under the Queensberry rules, I should warn you that I was middleweight boxing champion of the British Army in 1946, and can still throw as good a left jab as anyone.
But, if you'll apologise, Sir, I'll take this no further.
But should I not receive an apology, or you don’t agree to a duel or boxing match, I will gather up my my whip, fly down to wherever it is you live, and personally thrash you. And it is no use you hiding, for my men will track you down. The choice, Sir, is yours. Three days, or else.
Jeremy.
Over the next few hours I kept checking in at the blogging site in question, but there was no reply to my challenge. So I left another comment, saying I was still waiting, and that "Jimmy" must act like a man and respond appropriately.
After clicking in to the blogging site for the umpteenth time, I at last saw "Jimmy's" response, which said:
Ter Jeremy - Yew should know that as uh citizen of thuh Yew Nited States ah am permitted ter say whawt ah wawnt under thuh first amend-ment of thuh Amer'can const’tootion.
An’ yew should know that if yew or any of yer boys put one step on mah land, me an’ mah own boys will be waitin’ fer yew with our shotguns, an’ we will blow yer heads off. So if yew an’ yer boys wawnt ter hav' yer heads blown off, why, yew jus’ mosey right awn over.
Jimmy.
I replied thus:
To Jimmy - Sir, you may well have the right to say what you please under your constitution, but I also have the right to call you out for satisfaction when you insult the British monarchy.
In your answer, it seems to me clear, Sir, that you don’t wish to face me alone, man to man, thereby confirming that you are an unmanly coward. As I write this, it is slightly over 24 hours until my deadline expires for your unequivocal apology to me for your damnable insult to Her Majesty the Queen.
I should now inform you, Sir, that those of my men in the United States have already ascertained where you live in Texas. Failing your apology, or acceptance for a duel or boxing match, they will, on the expiry of the deadline, proceed to take out your men.
I should also tell you that my men were commandos in the British Army, and who now work for me whenever I have need of them. Their training is such that they will have no trouble in neutralising your men.
I have already booked a flight to Texas, and will be there inside 24 hours. Once my men have taken out yours, they will give me the signal. Whereupon I will proceed to your abode to administer to you, Sir, with my leather whip, the thrashing you so clearly deserve.
However, you still have 24 hours to come to your senses.
If you wish still to apologise, or accept my challenge to a duel or boxing match, you need only indicate this on this blogging site, since I will be monitoring it each hour until then, even during my flight to Texas, because I will have my laptop with me on the plane. But if you know what is good for you, Sir, you will apologise.
Jeremy.
This posting has gone on long enough. I'll continue it next time.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Friday Night Fights
These last few days have been emotional ones for me, as you will have noted from my last posting. For me, November 11th will always a special day, being the day the Great War ended. There are only four or five of us left who fought in the Great War. Who will be the last to depart?
I do hope it'll be me, for I've much living still to do, despite being on the run from the American police. For instance I've plans to return to the boxing ring, this time as a professional, for I'm convinced I would beat most of the lightweights and welterweights I see on TV's Friday Night Fights. My appearing on Friday Night Fights might well draw more more viewers than normal, for how many 113 year old professional fighters are there? I could be the only one, hence my potential box-office appeal.
I'm still in good physical shape, since I work out vigorously every second day, starting with a two-mile run, then going to the gym and hitting the speed and heavy bags, then finishing up with several rounds of sparring with my men, Mikey Squeaky and Freddy. Not having boxed competitively since 1946, I do have ring rust, though. But after a warm-up fight or two, I'd be ready for prime time on Friday Night Fights.
I'm not, however, thinking beyond Friday Night Fights, for I wish not to think too far ahead, given my age, and that, if caught by the police, I could go to jail for the rest of my life, or be sent to the electric chair, or be lethally injected. But should this not happen, I'm open to challenging for either the world welterweight or lightweight championship if successful on Friday Night Fights.
Also, I should write my memoirs, for I've much to tell, given I've lived so long. I mean, I've seen memoirs by people as young as fifty, which go on for three-hundred or four-hundred pages. Since I've lived over sixty years longer than these fifty-year olds, who to me are mere children, think how long my memoirs would be? They might necessarily be two volumes.
I should have begun my memoirs long ago, I do realize, but I'm a life-long procrastinator. Being on the run from the police, though, does concentrate the mind, and mine is now concentrated, believe you me.
So I'm determined to begin on my memoirs right away. To the extent that I may include some of what I've written on this blog in my planned memoirs, I will serendipitously have already begun them.
I do hope it'll be me, for I've much living still to do, despite being on the run from the American police. For instance I've plans to return to the boxing ring, this time as a professional, for I'm convinced I would beat most of the lightweights and welterweights I see on TV's Friday Night Fights. My appearing on Friday Night Fights might well draw more more viewers than normal, for how many 113 year old professional fighters are there? I could be the only one, hence my potential box-office appeal.
I'm still in good physical shape, since I work out vigorously every second day, starting with a two-mile run, then going to the gym and hitting the speed and heavy bags, then finishing up with several rounds of sparring with my men, Mikey Squeaky and Freddy. Not having boxed competitively since 1946, I do have ring rust, though. But after a warm-up fight or two, I'd be ready for prime time on Friday Night Fights.
I'm not, however, thinking beyond Friday Night Fights, for I wish not to think too far ahead, given my age, and that, if caught by the police, I could go to jail for the rest of my life, or be sent to the electric chair, or be lethally injected. But should this not happen, I'm open to challenging for either the world welterweight or lightweight championship if successful on Friday Night Fights.
Also, I should write my memoirs, for I've much to tell, given I've lived so long. I mean, I've seen memoirs by people as young as fifty, which go on for three-hundred or four-hundred pages. Since I've lived over sixty years longer than these fifty-year olds, who to me are mere children, think how long my memoirs would be? They might necessarily be two volumes.
I should have begun my memoirs long ago, I do realize, but I'm a life-long procrastinator. Being on the run from the police, though, does concentrate the mind, and mine is now concentrated, believe you me.
So I'm determined to begin on my memoirs right away. To the extent that I may include some of what I've written on this blog in my planned memoirs, I will serendipitously have already begun them.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Juliette
This time of year, autumn, I associate always with the falling leaves, rain, and mists of my beloved England - so, so different from the Texas where I now am, with its cloudless skies, warm days, and dry sagebrush terrain. And my home here in Texas - an underground basement of a demolished house in a dilapidated area of a city - is as far removed from my rural cottage in England as can be imagined. However, the older I become, the more easily I'm able to disappear into the past. This is wonderfully comforting, for, when I'm there, it's as real to me as the depressing reality of my circumstances in Texas.
There are few circumstances more depressing than mine - being in a foreign country as an outlaw on the run from the police. The good news is, I suppose, that I and my three men, Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, are still free. But free from what? I mean, we never know which hour will be our last in freedom whenever we see a policeman. The strain of being on the run, always being watchful, never trusting anyone, seeps into the bones, into the core of one’s being.
I've half a mind to walk into the nearest police station and turn myself and my three men in, just to get the suspense over with. On the other hand, the thought of being strapped down on a bed and given a lethal injection, or being strapped in an electric chair and fried when the switch is pulled, isn't pleasant.
My present circumstances haven't prevented me thinking recently of the Great War in which I fought, since in just two days, November 11th, it will be ninety years to the day, November 11th 1918, when the guns finally fell silent. The Great War changed me for ever, for I entered it in August 1914 a boy, and emerged in November 1918 a man.
***
I remember August 4th 1914 as if yesterday, because it was the day we Englishmen declared war on the Hun. The previous day, August 3rd, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm had declared war on France, so how could I, as an Englishman, do anything other than join in the coming melee? I was most happy to fight the Hun since it promised to be a jolly good scrap. Besides, the war would be short, and I'd be home by Christmas after our glorious victory. I was afraid only that I wouldn't get to do any fighting before the Hun fled.
Well, the Great War didn’t turn out quite that way. Instead of coming home unscathed and beribboned after a brief scrap and a glorious victory, I was stuck in trenches in a stalemate, amid a carnage I couldn't even have imagined. I was intent only on surviving. I even sympathized with the German soldiers, since they were the same cogs in a leviathanian engine as was I.
That I emerged from the war not dead was a miracle, quite possibly because I got in the way of a German bullet during the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Thus I spent many months in hospital, and so was out of the way of other bullets and shells for all that time. Our casualties during that summer and autumn while fighting at the Somme were........well........staggering. On just the first day, July 1st 1916, we English alone lost 19,000 dead and 35,000 wounded. So I consider it jolly lucky I wasn’t killed, but only wounded, although my wound was a bad one.
As a mere old soldier, and not a poet or litterateur, I’m not able adequately to describe what it was like on that first day of the Battle of the Somme. But, some years later, I found a passage written by the poet, John Masefield, which renders perfectly the atmosphere at the moment we launched our attack at 7.30 am that morning of July 1st 1916:
“…...the hand of time rested on the half-hour mark, and all along that old front line of the English there came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the presence of death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across No Man’s Land to begin the Battle of the Somme…….. ”.
But I'll not dwell on the whining bullets, the screeching shells, the thudding explosions, the soup-like mud, the pungent gas, the opaque mists, the relentless rain, the penetrating cold, the rotting corpses, the scurrying rats - for even after more than 90 years I still find it painful to contemplate.
No, I wish instead to talk of Juliette, who tended to me in the ward of the hospital in the French city of Rouen, to where I was taken from the battlefield after a bullet felled me. I remember the bullet's thud, and the blood gushing from my chest. Then............nothing.
* * *
When Juliette first came into my ward I saw her as simply another anonymous nurse. Besides, I was in such bad shape that I was consumed only with my pain. I'd had an emergency operation because the bullet had entered my right lung, and ripped through my inner organs before exiting my upper back. In the days following the operation my pain would become so excruciating that Juliette injected me with morphine, which made me deliciously drowsy and I would inwardly let go.
One day when I was drowsing thus, I heard voices speaking loudly from somewhere in the ward, then Juliette’s voice saying, “Be quiet, there’s a boy dying here”. She of course said this in French, but I remembered enough of my schoolboy French to understand what she’d said. Her words came as such a shock I immediately stopped letting go, and my pain immediately returned. I’d begun to fight again for my life.
Throughout the following weeks as I recovered, and Juliette and I got to know each other better, I began to regard her less as a nurse and more......how shall I say.........as a woman. But since I judged Juliette to be several years older than the twenty-one I was then, I knew my growing passion would be unrequited.
In her nurse’s uniform Juliette looked, apart from her exquisite cheekbones, as nondescript as most nurses when in uniform. But I imagined how she might look dressed up to go to a soiree, with her hair, normally coiled under the nurse’s cap, unpinned and bouncing around her bare shoulders, and the outlines of her curves showing to full effect under a clinging gown. And I sensed that behind her eyes, and her professional demeanour, there lurked a passionate woman. But I also sensed in her a deep sadness.
***
As my wounds healed and I could again walk short distances, Juliette would accompany me around the hospital’s spacious grounds, even during her hours off. She seemed genuinely interested in me, and I felt flattered because I couldn’t imagine a woman being interested in what I was interested in - cricket, rugger, boxing, hunting, sword-fencing, horse-racing, and military history and tactics.
I knew nothing of what women liked to talk about, since I had associated almost solely with men – whether at home where my only sibling was a brother, or at my boys-only school at Eton, or in the army, or playing cricket, rugger, and all of that. As an Englishman I considered girls frivolous and silly creatures, and to be seen to take them seriously was to invite ridicule from my fellow Englishmen. Girls were simply beyond the pale, as foreign as visitors from outer space.
When I talked with Juliette about cricket, rugger, boxing, and all of that, she appeared interested. But I sensed she was more interested in the me who spoke the words. Juliette's passion was literature, particularly French literature. When she talked of novels like Stendhal’s ”Le Rouge et le Noir” and Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” she became animated, bespeaking that these novels lay close to her heart.
No doubt wishing to expand my mind beyond cricket rugger and boxing, Juliette lent me ”Le Rouge et le Noir” and “Madame Bovary” to read. Thus I read them out of duty, but also because they might bring me closer to Juliette. Consequently we discussed at length the characters of Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary, and why they embarked on their illicit romantic liaisons. Juliette’s eyes became infused with her laughter as we read to each other the various passages in the books which depicted the pomposities and hypocrisies of the nineteenth century French bourgeoisie. And her eyes became misty when we talked about the sad and tragic deaths of Julien and Emma.
Did Juliette see me as Julien Sorel, with his romantic illusions and predilection for older women like Madame de Renal? Or maybe as Leon Dupuis, the young law student with whom the older and married Emma Bovary had a passionate affair? I, for my part, saw Juliette as Madames de Renal and Bovary rolled into one.
* * *
After some weeks of convalescence I was strong enough to venture further than the hospital grounds. So Juliette and I made many outings to the city of Rouen itself, to explore its 1500 year history. Over many visits, while Juliette guided me through Rouen’s historic churches and museums, she began to talking of her own past. I learned she’d grown up in a modest but respectable bourgeois family in a suburb of Paris, and had been a bright and diligent student when at school. She dreamed of going to the Université de Paris to get a degree in the French literature which she loved. But her family had other ideas, and persuaded her to instead study nursing.
Despite studying nursing – as respectable a profession for a young woman as could be imagined - Juliette in her free time socialized, not with nurses or doctors, but with the free-thinking avant-garde artistic crowd – poets, painters, sculptors, philosophers, musicians – in the cafes of Paris’s Left-Bank. She met Phillippe, a painter, with whom she became smitten, and he with her. Subsequently they rented a flat together.
I was shocked to learn this, since, in the milieu I had grown up in, it just wasn’t done for young men and women to live together without being married. But then Juliette and Phillippe were of a milieu, a French Parisian artistic milieu, a milieu very different from mine – the milieu of bourgeois Anglo-Saxon England.
Juliette’s and Phillipe’s domestic bliss ended when the guns of August 1914 began firing. Phillippe, who, like most of the men of France, was an army reservist, was called up and sent to the front to fight the German invaders. Juliette, as a qualified nurse, was assigned to the military hospital at Rouen, to attend the wounded.
A year later, in September 1915, she learned that Philippe had died in the course of the French army’s major offensive west of Verdun against the Germans. Juliette said that when she received this shattering news, she wanted, too, to die, so to be with Philipe. But, instead, she immersed herself in her nursing duties to the exclusion of all else.
* * *
Under Juliette's care I recovered to the point when I would be discharged from the hospital and returned to the front. Somehow this prospect didn’t cheer me, for I'd realized that being looked-after in hospital by Juliette, and seeing and talking with her every day, and going for our outings, was infinitely more pleasurable than living in a muddy trench, dodging bullets, being deafened by exploding shells, stumbling over rotting corpses, being drenched by rain, and being bitten by rats.
But, as an Englishman, I should have been chomping at the bit to return to the front, despite the bullets, shells, rain, mud, rats, and rotting corpses. Obviously my moral fibre had been weakened by my prolonged absence from the exclusive world of fighting-men, and by the proximity of Juliette.
I discerned in Juliette that my approaching return to the front was not inconsequential to her. She became yet more attentive, and her eyes often became moist. On the day before my departure she hinted that we might spend the coming night together, and she knew of a hotel………. To say I was dumbfounded would be an understatement, since respectable young women of that time just didn’t make such suggestions to their gentlemen friends.
On the other hand, Juliette - the erstwhile frequenter of Left-Bank cafes, and friend to painters and artists - was a bohemian at heart, and……..well…….French.
* * *
I won't go into the minutiae of what Juliette and I did together throughout that night. I'll say only that it was a night which will live with me always, a night of unbridled love, a night in which Juliette and I slaked the fires of our banked-up passion.
When dawn came we could hardly let go of each other. Together we walked to the train station. My heart breaking, I got on the train, and, through its windows I gazed at Juliette’s shrinking outline as the train propelled me back to the world of bullets, shells, rain, mud, rats, and corpses……….
* * *
I was a major-general commanding a division of the British Second Army as it fought its way from the beaches of Normandy and into northern France in the spring of 1944. Rouen - Juliette's Rouen - was among the cities my division passed through. As I was driven in my jeep through the city, I noticed sadly the heavily-damaged buildings, particularly the almost-destroyed cathedral – everything so different from when Juliette and I had explored them. I told my driver to stop the jeep, for I wished to walk around, to re-live briefly my memories of that time so long ago.
Walking down one of Rouen's main thoroughfares I noticed a late-middle-aged woman walking along the pavement on the other side. I recognized Juliette in an instant. I made to cross the street to accost her, but had to stop because some amoured cars rumbled by, obscuring my view of Juliette. When the vehicles had passed, Juliette was gone. She may have disappeared along a side-street, who knows?
I abandoned my pursuit, leaving the past in peace.
There are few circumstances more depressing than mine - being in a foreign country as an outlaw on the run from the police. The good news is, I suppose, that I and my three men, Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, are still free. But free from what? I mean, we never know which hour will be our last in freedom whenever we see a policeman. The strain of being on the run, always being watchful, never trusting anyone, seeps into the bones, into the core of one’s being.
I've half a mind to walk into the nearest police station and turn myself and my three men in, just to get the suspense over with. On the other hand, the thought of being strapped down on a bed and given a lethal injection, or being strapped in an electric chair and fried when the switch is pulled, isn't pleasant.
My present circumstances haven't prevented me thinking recently of the Great War in which I fought, since in just two days, November 11th, it will be ninety years to the day, November 11th 1918, when the guns finally fell silent. The Great War changed me for ever, for I entered it in August 1914 a boy, and emerged in November 1918 a man.
***
I remember August 4th 1914 as if yesterday, because it was the day we Englishmen declared war on the Hun. The previous day, August 3rd, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm had declared war on France, so how could I, as an Englishman, do anything other than join in the coming melee? I was most happy to fight the Hun since it promised to be a jolly good scrap. Besides, the war would be short, and I'd be home by Christmas after our glorious victory. I was afraid only that I wouldn't get to do any fighting before the Hun fled.
Well, the Great War didn’t turn out quite that way. Instead of coming home unscathed and beribboned after a brief scrap and a glorious victory, I was stuck in trenches in a stalemate, amid a carnage I couldn't even have imagined. I was intent only on surviving. I even sympathized with the German soldiers, since they were the same cogs in a leviathanian engine as was I.
That I emerged from the war not dead was a miracle, quite possibly because I got in the way of a German bullet during the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Thus I spent many months in hospital, and so was out of the way of other bullets and shells for all that time. Our casualties during that summer and autumn while fighting at the Somme were........well........staggering. On just the first day, July 1st 1916, we English alone lost 19,000 dead and 35,000 wounded. So I consider it jolly lucky I wasn’t killed, but only wounded, although my wound was a bad one.
As a mere old soldier, and not a poet or litterateur, I’m not able adequately to describe what it was like on that first day of the Battle of the Somme. But, some years later, I found a passage written by the poet, John Masefield, which renders perfectly the atmosphere at the moment we launched our attack at 7.30 am that morning of July 1st 1916:
“…...the hand of time rested on the half-hour mark, and all along that old front line of the English there came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the presence of death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across No Man’s Land to begin the Battle of the Somme…….. ”.
But I'll not dwell on the whining bullets, the screeching shells, the thudding explosions, the soup-like mud, the pungent gas, the opaque mists, the relentless rain, the penetrating cold, the rotting corpses, the scurrying rats - for even after more than 90 years I still find it painful to contemplate.
No, I wish instead to talk of Juliette, who tended to me in the ward of the hospital in the French city of Rouen, to where I was taken from the battlefield after a bullet felled me. I remember the bullet's thud, and the blood gushing from my chest. Then............nothing.
* * *
When Juliette first came into my ward I saw her as simply another anonymous nurse. Besides, I was in such bad shape that I was consumed only with my pain. I'd had an emergency operation because the bullet had entered my right lung, and ripped through my inner organs before exiting my upper back. In the days following the operation my pain would become so excruciating that Juliette injected me with morphine, which made me deliciously drowsy and I would inwardly let go.
One day when I was drowsing thus, I heard voices speaking loudly from somewhere in the ward, then Juliette’s voice saying, “Be quiet, there’s a boy dying here”. She of course said this in French, but I remembered enough of my schoolboy French to understand what she’d said. Her words came as such a shock I immediately stopped letting go, and my pain immediately returned. I’d begun to fight again for my life.
Throughout the following weeks as I recovered, and Juliette and I got to know each other better, I began to regard her less as a nurse and more......how shall I say.........as a woman. But since I judged Juliette to be several years older than the twenty-one I was then, I knew my growing passion would be unrequited.
In her nurse’s uniform Juliette looked, apart from her exquisite cheekbones, as nondescript as most nurses when in uniform. But I imagined how she might look dressed up to go to a soiree, with her hair, normally coiled under the nurse’s cap, unpinned and bouncing around her bare shoulders, and the outlines of her curves showing to full effect under a clinging gown. And I sensed that behind her eyes, and her professional demeanour, there lurked a passionate woman. But I also sensed in her a deep sadness.
***
As my wounds healed and I could again walk short distances, Juliette would accompany me around the hospital’s spacious grounds, even during her hours off. She seemed genuinely interested in me, and I felt flattered because I couldn’t imagine a woman being interested in what I was interested in - cricket, rugger, boxing, hunting, sword-fencing, horse-racing, and military history and tactics.
I knew nothing of what women liked to talk about, since I had associated almost solely with men – whether at home where my only sibling was a brother, or at my boys-only school at Eton, or in the army, or playing cricket, rugger, and all of that. As an Englishman I considered girls frivolous and silly creatures, and to be seen to take them seriously was to invite ridicule from my fellow Englishmen. Girls were simply beyond the pale, as foreign as visitors from outer space.
When I talked with Juliette about cricket, rugger, boxing, and all of that, she appeared interested. But I sensed she was more interested in the me who spoke the words. Juliette's passion was literature, particularly French literature. When she talked of novels like Stendhal’s ”Le Rouge et le Noir” and Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” she became animated, bespeaking that these novels lay close to her heart.
No doubt wishing to expand my mind beyond cricket rugger and boxing, Juliette lent me ”Le Rouge et le Noir” and “Madame Bovary” to read. Thus I read them out of duty, but also because they might bring me closer to Juliette. Consequently we discussed at length the characters of Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary, and why they embarked on their illicit romantic liaisons. Juliette’s eyes became infused with her laughter as we read to each other the various passages in the books which depicted the pomposities and hypocrisies of the nineteenth century French bourgeoisie. And her eyes became misty when we talked about the sad and tragic deaths of Julien and Emma.
Did Juliette see me as Julien Sorel, with his romantic illusions and predilection for older women like Madame de Renal? Or maybe as Leon Dupuis, the young law student with whom the older and married Emma Bovary had a passionate affair? I, for my part, saw Juliette as Madames de Renal and Bovary rolled into one.
* * *
After some weeks of convalescence I was strong enough to venture further than the hospital grounds. So Juliette and I made many outings to the city of Rouen itself, to explore its 1500 year history. Over many visits, while Juliette guided me through Rouen’s historic churches and museums, she began to talking of her own past. I learned she’d grown up in a modest but respectable bourgeois family in a suburb of Paris, and had been a bright and diligent student when at school. She dreamed of going to the Université de Paris to get a degree in the French literature which she loved. But her family had other ideas, and persuaded her to instead study nursing.
Despite studying nursing – as respectable a profession for a young woman as could be imagined - Juliette in her free time socialized, not with nurses or doctors, but with the free-thinking avant-garde artistic crowd – poets, painters, sculptors, philosophers, musicians – in the cafes of Paris’s Left-Bank. She met Phillippe, a painter, with whom she became smitten, and he with her. Subsequently they rented a flat together.
I was shocked to learn this, since, in the milieu I had grown up in, it just wasn’t done for young men and women to live together without being married. But then Juliette and Phillippe were of a milieu, a French Parisian artistic milieu, a milieu very different from mine – the milieu of bourgeois Anglo-Saxon England.
Juliette’s and Phillipe’s domestic bliss ended when the guns of August 1914 began firing. Phillippe, who, like most of the men of France, was an army reservist, was called up and sent to the front to fight the German invaders. Juliette, as a qualified nurse, was assigned to the military hospital at Rouen, to attend the wounded.
A year later, in September 1915, she learned that Philippe had died in the course of the French army’s major offensive west of Verdun against the Germans. Juliette said that when she received this shattering news, she wanted, too, to die, so to be with Philipe. But, instead, she immersed herself in her nursing duties to the exclusion of all else.
* * *
Under Juliette's care I recovered to the point when I would be discharged from the hospital and returned to the front. Somehow this prospect didn’t cheer me, for I'd realized that being looked-after in hospital by Juliette, and seeing and talking with her every day, and going for our outings, was infinitely more pleasurable than living in a muddy trench, dodging bullets, being deafened by exploding shells, stumbling over rotting corpses, being drenched by rain, and being bitten by rats.
But, as an Englishman, I should have been chomping at the bit to return to the front, despite the bullets, shells, rain, mud, rats, and rotting corpses. Obviously my moral fibre had been weakened by my prolonged absence from the exclusive world of fighting-men, and by the proximity of Juliette.
I discerned in Juliette that my approaching return to the front was not inconsequential to her. She became yet more attentive, and her eyes often became moist. On the day before my departure she hinted that we might spend the coming night together, and she knew of a hotel………. To say I was dumbfounded would be an understatement, since respectable young women of that time just didn’t make such suggestions to their gentlemen friends.
On the other hand, Juliette - the erstwhile frequenter of Left-Bank cafes, and friend to painters and artists - was a bohemian at heart, and……..well…….French.
* * *
I won't go into the minutiae of what Juliette and I did together throughout that night. I'll say only that it was a night which will live with me always, a night of unbridled love, a night in which Juliette and I slaked the fires of our banked-up passion.
When dawn came we could hardly let go of each other. Together we walked to the train station. My heart breaking, I got on the train, and, through its windows I gazed at Juliette’s shrinking outline as the train propelled me back to the world of bullets, shells, rain, mud, rats, and corpses……….
* * *
I was a major-general commanding a division of the British Second Army as it fought its way from the beaches of Normandy and into northern France in the spring of 1944. Rouen - Juliette's Rouen - was among the cities my division passed through. As I was driven in my jeep through the city, I noticed sadly the heavily-damaged buildings, particularly the almost-destroyed cathedral – everything so different from when Juliette and I had explored them. I told my driver to stop the jeep, for I wished to walk around, to re-live briefly my memories of that time so long ago.
Walking down one of Rouen's main thoroughfares I noticed a late-middle-aged woman walking along the pavement on the other side. I recognized Juliette in an instant. I made to cross the street to accost her, but had to stop because some amoured cars rumbled by, obscuring my view of Juliette. When the vehicles had passed, Juliette was gone. She may have disappeared along a side-street, who knows?
I abandoned my pursuit, leaving the past in peace.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
The Duchess
Some nights ago I went out to the film "The Duchess". Yes, despite being on the run from the American police from sea to shining sea, I don't let this stop me going out to see films. However, where I used to attend matinees because they are cheaper than evening showings, I now attend films only at night because men, like me, on the run, are more difficult for the police to detect in the dark than in daylight.
Even when inside film theatres, I scan continually the other patrons to see if any look like plain-clothes policemen. I'm not able, therefore, to pay as close attention to the films as I would like. It's among the many additional burdens I bear.
As I watched "The Duchess" I wondered if the patrons sitting on either side of me, would, in their wildest dreams, have imagined that next to them was a man who the police throughout America are looking for, for committing crimes for which he could go to the electric chair, or given a lethal injection. Not only that, but a man who fought as a subaltern in the trenches of France in World War One, and who commanded brigades and divisions in all the theatres of war in World War Two, and who was British military attache in Washington in the days of John F Kennedy, the days of Camelot.
Now, to "The Duchess". The film is set in the England of circa 1774, and revolves around Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightly), a daughter of the nobility, who is betrothed by her determined mother, Lady Spencer (Charlotte Rampling) to William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), a very rich nobleman, in order to give him a male heir. However, after Georgiana marries the Duke, and becomes Duchess of Devonshire, and begins to produce children, they are all girls. Thus she fails to keep her side of the bargain, which the Duke doesn't take kindly to - a state of affairs not conducive to marital bliss.
Also not conducive to marital bliss was the Duke's approach to his conjugal obligations, an approach which was.......how shall we say.........efficient? businesslike? As I watched I realized how my own carrying out of my conjugal obligations to my late wife, Gladys, had been similar to the Duke's. How sad it's only now that I realize the humiliation my poor Gladys must have suffered as she lay back in our marriage bed and thought of England while I lay atop her rigid body and slaked my lust.
Returning to "The Duchess". An acquaintance of the Duke's, a Lady Elizabeth Foster, was taken into the household on the Duke's insistence. Thus there were three in the marriage, for Lady Elizabeth also became the recipient of the Duke's carnal affections. Before the Duchess discovered this, she and Lady Elizabeth were becoming friends and confidantes, so much so that there was an erotic charge between them. On one occasion, Lady Elizabeth gave the Duchess a mild massage, which led to something much more. As I watched, waves of concupiscence coursed through my body, for I've always found the spectacle of two beautiful women making love with each other to be most erotic.
I've written before of discovering my wife Gladys and a woman friend of hers in bed together, naked. I reacted as an Englishman of that time - the 1920s - would act, with shock, outrage, and humiliation. I and the two ladies prevented the scandal from leaking. But had it leaked, I would have taken my life, for my honour as an Englishman and as an army officer, would have demanded it.
But I ignored another feeling when I discovered Gladys and her friend - intense desire, for, as I've said, I've always found the sight, and even idea, of two women making love as most erotic. Had I gone with my ignored feeling on that long ago afternoon, I would have asked Gladys and her friend if I could join them, then stripped off my clothes and done so.
I'll always regret not doing this, for I never again had the opportunity to make group-love with two women, and I expect I never will, for it's difficult enough nowadays to find one woman to make love with, let alone two.
I hope all you've read so far will make you want to see "The Duchess" , for I do recommend it, and wholeheartedly. To whet your appetite even more, please do watch the British trailer to "The Duchess" here, and the American trailer here.
Even when inside film theatres, I scan continually the other patrons to see if any look like plain-clothes policemen. I'm not able, therefore, to pay as close attention to the films as I would like. It's among the many additional burdens I bear.
As I watched "The Duchess" I wondered if the patrons sitting on either side of me, would, in their wildest dreams, have imagined that next to them was a man who the police throughout America are looking for, for committing crimes for which he could go to the electric chair, or given a lethal injection. Not only that, but a man who fought as a subaltern in the trenches of France in World War One, and who commanded brigades and divisions in all the theatres of war in World War Two, and who was British military attache in Washington in the days of John F Kennedy, the days of Camelot.
Now, to "The Duchess". The film is set in the England of circa 1774, and revolves around Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightly), a daughter of the nobility, who is betrothed by her determined mother, Lady Spencer (Charlotte Rampling) to William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), a very rich nobleman, in order to give him a male heir. However, after Georgiana marries the Duke, and becomes Duchess of Devonshire, and begins to produce children, they are all girls. Thus she fails to keep her side of the bargain, which the Duke doesn't take kindly to - a state of affairs not conducive to marital bliss.
Also not conducive to marital bliss was the Duke's approach to his conjugal obligations, an approach which was.......how shall we say.........efficient? businesslike? As I watched I realized how my own carrying out of my conjugal obligations to my late wife, Gladys, had been similar to the Duke's. How sad it's only now that I realize the humiliation my poor Gladys must have suffered as she lay back in our marriage bed and thought of England while I lay atop her rigid body and slaked my lust.
Returning to "The Duchess". An acquaintance of the Duke's, a Lady Elizabeth Foster, was taken into the household on the Duke's insistence. Thus there were three in the marriage, for Lady Elizabeth also became the recipient of the Duke's carnal affections. Before the Duchess discovered this, she and Lady Elizabeth were becoming friends and confidantes, so much so that there was an erotic charge between them. On one occasion, Lady Elizabeth gave the Duchess a mild massage, which led to something much more. As I watched, waves of concupiscence coursed through my body, for I've always found the spectacle of two beautiful women making love with each other to be most erotic.
I've written before of discovering my wife Gladys and a woman friend of hers in bed together, naked. I reacted as an Englishman of that time - the 1920s - would act, with shock, outrage, and humiliation. I and the two ladies prevented the scandal from leaking. But had it leaked, I would have taken my life, for my honour as an Englishman and as an army officer, would have demanded it.
But I ignored another feeling when I discovered Gladys and her friend - intense desire, for, as I've said, I've always found the sight, and even idea, of two women making love as most erotic. Had I gone with my ignored feeling on that long ago afternoon, I would have asked Gladys and her friend if I could join them, then stripped off my clothes and done so.
I'll always regret not doing this, for I never again had the opportunity to make group-love with two women, and I expect I never will, for it's difficult enough nowadays to find one woman to make love with, let alone two.
I hope all you've read so far will make you want to see "The Duchess" , for I do recommend it, and wholeheartedly. To whet your appetite even more, please do watch the British trailer to "The Duchess" here, and the American trailer here.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Indiana Wants Me
My being on the run from the police in America has its genesis in the web-logosphere. Sitting in my study each morning in my country retreat in dear old England which I fear I'll never again see, I would read the latest postings on my favourite web-logs. In this way I became so addicted to the web-logosphere that I began my own web-log, which led little by little to my present terrible circumstances.
It may seem strange that a very old man such as I, should immerse himself reading and writing web-logs, given they are part and parcel of so contemporary a medium as the internet. Thus I belong to the avant garde, my fingers on the Zeitgeist. Doubtless you're thinking that, far from belonging to the avant garde with my fingers on the Zeitgeist, I should be slumped in a wheelchair in an old people's home, wrapped in a shawl and blanket, the spittle from my toothless old mouth running down my chin, too helpless to do anything, let alone reading and writing web-logs on the internet - a medium unimaginable in the Victorian and Edwardian England in which I came of age.
I was, fortunately, blessed with excellent genes, for both my mater and pater lived to very old ages, albeit the ages they lived to weren't quite what mine is today. And I don't remember either ever being ill until just before each departed to meet their Maker. I, of course, did have my differences with my mater and pater. In short, we didn't always get along. However, if nothing else, I'll always be grateful to them for the excellent genes they bequeathed me, for I, too, have never been ill enough to take to my bed, and, absent my mater and pater's genes, I would surely be long dead.
I should qualify my saying that I've "......never been ill enough to take to my bed.......", for I did once take to my bed, and for many months, since my bed was, of all places, in a military hospital. This was during World War One, when, as a subaltern fighting against the Boche in the trenches in France, I sustained serious wounds. I'm sure that, but for the genes of my mater and pater, I would have died of my wounds.
While good genes are important, they are never quite enough. Thus throughout my long life I've always exercised vigorously, and, until relatively recently, I did this daily. Now, in a concession to age, I've cut exercising to once each two days. As I've explained in previous postings, I exercise as do boxers, for I've had a lifelong love of the Sweet Science. In my workouts I punch both the speed and heavy bags, skip rope, and spar. I also jog two miles each second day, since developing stamina, which jogging does, is de rigueur for the self-respecting boxer.
As I've also said in a previous posting, I was sufficiently skilled in the Sweet Science to have won the middleweight championship of the British Army in 1946 when 51. Why so long? for 51 is old to win a title. Well, the reason was World War Two, which began when I was 44, when boxing tournaments were put in cold storage, given the British Army having more urgent things with which to occupy itself, than hold boxing tournaments.
Ideally 1919, following the Armistice, when I was 23, was the time to quest the title, for at 23 a boxer is in his prime. However, just as World War Two foiled my championship plans, so had World War One, since, from age 19 to 23, I was either fighting the Boche in the trenches of France, or was in the hospital recovering from wounds. Only in 1922, when I was 27, did I recover sufficiently to resume gym workouts. Add to this, that between 1922 and 1939 I languished mostly in military garrisons in far flung places throughout the British Empire - places so far flung that they didn't have gyms to train in. Then came World War 2. Thus the championship eluded me until I was in my boxing dotage.
Despite my age, I'm considering officially returning to the ring. Doubtless my reflexes won't quite be what they were, and I might have to fight as a lightweight or welterweight rather than as a middleweight, for I'm lighter now than in 1946, when last I fought. Hopefully I've retained my middleweight punching power, which would overwhelm my lightweight or welterweight opponents, thus compensating for my slower reflexes.
My returning to the ring depends, of course, on my escaping America and back to dear old England. Easier said than done, given that the police in America are looking for me - in all 50 states.
It may seem strange that a very old man such as I, should immerse himself reading and writing web-logs, given they are part and parcel of so contemporary a medium as the internet. Thus I belong to the avant garde, my fingers on the Zeitgeist. Doubtless you're thinking that, far from belonging to the avant garde with my fingers on the Zeitgeist, I should be slumped in a wheelchair in an old people's home, wrapped in a shawl and blanket, the spittle from my toothless old mouth running down my chin, too helpless to do anything, let alone reading and writing web-logs on the internet - a medium unimaginable in the Victorian and Edwardian England in which I came of age.
I was, fortunately, blessed with excellent genes, for both my mater and pater lived to very old ages, albeit the ages they lived to weren't quite what mine is today. And I don't remember either ever being ill until just before each departed to meet their Maker. I, of course, did have my differences with my mater and pater. In short, we didn't always get along. However, if nothing else, I'll always be grateful to them for the excellent genes they bequeathed me, for I, too, have never been ill enough to take to my bed, and, absent my mater and pater's genes, I would surely be long dead.
I should qualify my saying that I've "......never been ill enough to take to my bed.......", for I did once take to my bed, and for many months, since my bed was, of all places, in a military hospital. This was during World War One, when, as a subaltern fighting against the Boche in the trenches in France, I sustained serious wounds. I'm sure that, but for the genes of my mater and pater, I would have died of my wounds.
While good genes are important, they are never quite enough. Thus throughout my long life I've always exercised vigorously, and, until relatively recently, I did this daily. Now, in a concession to age, I've cut exercising to once each two days. As I've explained in previous postings, I exercise as do boxers, for I've had a lifelong love of the Sweet Science. In my workouts I punch both the speed and heavy bags, skip rope, and spar. I also jog two miles each second day, since developing stamina, which jogging does, is de rigueur for the self-respecting boxer.
As I've also said in a previous posting, I was sufficiently skilled in the Sweet Science to have won the middleweight championship of the British Army in 1946 when 51. Why so long? for 51 is old to win a title. Well, the reason was World War Two, which began when I was 44, when boxing tournaments were put in cold storage, given the British Army having more urgent things with which to occupy itself, than hold boxing tournaments.
Ideally 1919, following the Armistice, when I was 23, was the time to quest the title, for at 23 a boxer is in his prime. However, just as World War Two foiled my championship plans, so had World War One, since, from age 19 to 23, I was either fighting the Boche in the trenches of France, or was in the hospital recovering from wounds. Only in 1922, when I was 27, did I recover sufficiently to resume gym workouts. Add to this, that between 1922 and 1939 I languished mostly in military garrisons in far flung places throughout the British Empire - places so far flung that they didn't have gyms to train in. Then came World War 2. Thus the championship eluded me until I was in my boxing dotage.
Despite my age, I'm considering officially returning to the ring. Doubtless my reflexes won't quite be what they were, and I might have to fight as a lightweight or welterweight rather than as a middleweight, for I'm lighter now than in 1946, when last I fought. Hopefully I've retained my middleweight punching power, which would overwhelm my lightweight or welterweight opponents, thus compensating for my slower reflexes.
My returning to the ring depends, of course, on my escaping America and back to dear old England. Easier said than done, given that the police in America are looking for me - in all 50 states.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Where The Buffalo Roam
This'll be the third day in a row that I've written in this blog. Why is this, given I hadn't written anything for a year and a half? Obviously my inner voice is telling me I'm soon to meet my Maker, so I should say all I need to before this happens. This does makes sense, given I'm 113.
Paradoxically, I've been feeling very well of late, the result of going to the gym each second day, where for over an hour I hit the heavy bag, skip rope, and spar. And I take great care over what I eat. No more bangers and mash, fried eggs and bacon, or dripping roast beef for me. Now, it's muesli, vegetables, tofu, and the other stuff these left-wing namby-pamby socialists like to eat. Always learn from your enemies, is what I say.
I would today like to talk of my current home. But first I'll remind you that I'm in America, on the run from the police, and so are my men, Mikey Squeaky and Freddy. How we got into this predicament is an awfully long story, so I'll need several postings to tell all. I ask you, therefore, to be patient.
I do, in fact, have two homes. My main home is in the south of England, a delightful rural cottage in which I've lived for many, many years. It's so peaceful and quiet that I'd hoped to dwell there the rest of my life. But I fear I'll never again see it, for, as a hunted animal in America, I'm trapped here. Now I know how the coyotes and raccoons who eke out a wretched hunted existence in alleyways and culverts in the midst of our sprawling megalopolises must feel. I and they are birds of a feather, so to speak.
You'll understand, then, that my American home, which I share with Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, is necessarily as different from my English home as can be imagined. And it is likely as different from your own home as you could imagine, for mine is underneath the concrete foundation of a demolished house. As to its location, I can only say that it's somewhere in Texas. I hope you'll understand why I can't say more, for the police may have discovered this blog, and be reading it daily, hoping it'll reveal clues to my exact whereabouts. Fortunately Texas is big enough for me to say safely that I'm somewhere in it.
I and my men discovered what came to be our home while walking through an abandoned broken-down lot on the edge of a city, which, as I've said, I cannot name. I noticed an opening under one of the sides of the concrete foundation. I crawled through it and into what had been the basement part of the house. I saw it would be perfect for me and my men to live in, since it would provide rent-free shelter, and no-one, including the police, would suspect we'd be living there.
We furnished our new underground home with discarded furniture left in back lanes of nearby houses for the garbage men to remove. A thick cord of wire led into our home from the outside. On an impulse, I applied the end of it to a light bulb, which, incredibly, lit up. The cord must still have been connected to a power line outside. So we had free electricity.
Within days we had appropriated at no cost, all the necessities of a home – TV, mattresses, hotplate, pots and pans. If we need water we fill, late at night, large pots with water from water-taps situated in back gardens of nearby houses. For our ablutions, or answering the calls of nature, we use the toilets and washbasins in restaurants, or those in a nearby Greyhound Bus Depot.
For added secrecy, we've covered the entrance of our home with foliage. And we come and go in the dark as much as possible. I and my men have lived here some months now, and we've come to love it, for there's no place like home.
Paradoxically, I've been feeling very well of late, the result of going to the gym each second day, where for over an hour I hit the heavy bag, skip rope, and spar. And I take great care over what I eat. No more bangers and mash, fried eggs and bacon, or dripping roast beef for me. Now, it's muesli, vegetables, tofu, and the other stuff these left-wing namby-pamby socialists like to eat. Always learn from your enemies, is what I say.
I would today like to talk of my current home. But first I'll remind you that I'm in America, on the run from the police, and so are my men, Mikey Squeaky and Freddy. How we got into this predicament is an awfully long story, so I'll need several postings to tell all. I ask you, therefore, to be patient.
I do, in fact, have two homes. My main home is in the south of England, a delightful rural cottage in which I've lived for many, many years. It's so peaceful and quiet that I'd hoped to dwell there the rest of my life. But I fear I'll never again see it, for, as a hunted animal in America, I'm trapped here. Now I know how the coyotes and raccoons who eke out a wretched hunted existence in alleyways and culverts in the midst of our sprawling megalopolises must feel. I and they are birds of a feather, so to speak.
You'll understand, then, that my American home, which I share with Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, is necessarily as different from my English home as can be imagined. And it is likely as different from your own home as you could imagine, for mine is underneath the concrete foundation of a demolished house. As to its location, I can only say that it's somewhere in Texas. I hope you'll understand why I can't say more, for the police may have discovered this blog, and be reading it daily, hoping it'll reveal clues to my exact whereabouts. Fortunately Texas is big enough for me to say safely that I'm somewhere in it.
I and my men discovered what came to be our home while walking through an abandoned broken-down lot on the edge of a city, which, as I've said, I cannot name. I noticed an opening under one of the sides of the concrete foundation. I crawled through it and into what had been the basement part of the house. I saw it would be perfect for me and my men to live in, since it would provide rent-free shelter, and no-one, including the police, would suspect we'd be living there.
We furnished our new underground home with discarded furniture left in back lanes of nearby houses for the garbage men to remove. A thick cord of wire led into our home from the outside. On an impulse, I applied the end of it to a light bulb, which, incredibly, lit up. The cord must still have been connected to a power line outside. So we had free electricity.
Within days we had appropriated at no cost, all the necessities of a home – TV, mattresses, hotplate, pots and pans. If we need water we fill, late at night, large pots with water from water-taps situated in back gardens of nearby houses. For our ablutions, or answering the calls of nature, we use the toilets and washbasins in restaurants, or those in a nearby Greyhound Bus Depot.
For added secrecy, we've covered the entrance of our home with foliage. And we come and go in the dark as much as possible. I and my men have lived here some months now, and we've come to love it, for there's no place like home.
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Thinking of England
Writing in this blog after so, so long, as I did yesterday, has made me feel like a new man. Instead of the 113 year old which I am, and often feel, I feel this morning like a sprightly 75 year old. It's as if I had made love with a woman last night, so good do I feel.
Of course, being 113, I don't find it as easy to make love with a woman as when I was 75. But my libido hasn't totally gone, so I still look with desire upon many a young woman who I see in a supermarket and elsewhere. Could they ever contemplate in their heart of hearts that this 113 year old man shopping for food next to them, is thinking how they would look naked? And what if they could read my thoughts, how would they react? Would they run screaming to the supermarket manager to tell him to throw out that old man who's imagining them naked? Or would they feel flattered?
Knowing very little about women, I don't know how they would react. This is why when I do encounter a woman I find desirable, I don't let on that I do. I find it amazing how little I know about women, even though I was married to one - my late wife, Gladys - for over 50 years. In the weeks and months after Gladys and I had met, I thought I knew everything about her. And I continued to think this even during the first few years of our marriage. But as more time passed, it dawned on me that I knew almost nothing about her. When she died, she'd become a veritable stranger.
I've written elsewhere of the occasion when I discovered Gladys in bed with one of my fellow army officers. Our marriage was never the same thereafter. My conjugal demands on Gladys lessened to no more than three or four times a year, and I only made them when I was so consumed by the fires of lust that it was affecting my ability to make decisions as an army officer. You must understand that, as a high-ranking army officer, with the lives of so many men dependent on the decisions I made in war and in peace, it was imperative that I think clearly, and I absolutely couldn't when my body was consumed with the fires of lust.
I made Gladys understand this too, which is why when I made my conjugal demands on her, she complied, lay back, and - I've little doubt - thought of England. Of course, being a man, I was consumed by the fires of lust more than three or four times a year - more like three or four times a month. But there were usually other women around, including prostitutes, on whom I could slake my lust. But sometimes they weren't around, particularly when I was in-between affairs, and when I was posted to army garrisons in districts so sparsely populated, there were no prostitutes nearby.
Since I'm now 113, my being consumed by the fires of lust is no longer quite the problem it once was. But it's still sometimes a problem, and, to slake my lust, I must today rely almost solely on prostitutes, since I have little opportunity to meet women with whom I might have an affair. This is one of the downsides of living outside the law. But even were I on the right side of the law, and so were living contentedly in a nice suburban house with a lawn and garage and all of that, I still might find it difficult to find a woman with whom to sleep, because few women seem to want to sleep with a very old man like me without being paid to do so.
I do find this vexing, for prostitutes are an added drain on my budget - an irritating burden, since money is so hard to come by when one lives outside the law, as I'm now compelled to do.
Of course, being 113, I don't find it as easy to make love with a woman as when I was 75. But my libido hasn't totally gone, so I still look with desire upon many a young woman who I see in a supermarket and elsewhere. Could they ever contemplate in their heart of hearts that this 113 year old man shopping for food next to them, is thinking how they would look naked? And what if they could read my thoughts, how would they react? Would they run screaming to the supermarket manager to tell him to throw out that old man who's imagining them naked? Or would they feel flattered?
Knowing very little about women, I don't know how they would react. This is why when I do encounter a woman I find desirable, I don't let on that I do. I find it amazing how little I know about women, even though I was married to one - my late wife, Gladys - for over 50 years. In the weeks and months after Gladys and I had met, I thought I knew everything about her. And I continued to think this even during the first few years of our marriage. But as more time passed, it dawned on me that I knew almost nothing about her. When she died, she'd become a veritable stranger.
I've written elsewhere of the occasion when I discovered Gladys in bed with one of my fellow army officers. Our marriage was never the same thereafter. My conjugal demands on Gladys lessened to no more than three or four times a year, and I only made them when I was so consumed by the fires of lust that it was affecting my ability to make decisions as an army officer. You must understand that, as a high-ranking army officer, with the lives of so many men dependent on the decisions I made in war and in peace, it was imperative that I think clearly, and I absolutely couldn't when my body was consumed with the fires of lust.
I made Gladys understand this too, which is why when I made my conjugal demands on her, she complied, lay back, and - I've little doubt - thought of England. Of course, being a man, I was consumed by the fires of lust more than three or four times a year - more like three or four times a month. But there were usually other women around, including prostitutes, on whom I could slake my lust. But sometimes they weren't around, particularly when I was in-between affairs, and when I was posted to army garrisons in districts so sparsely populated, there were no prostitutes nearby.
Since I'm now 113, my being consumed by the fires of lust is no longer quite the problem it once was. But it's still sometimes a problem, and, to slake my lust, I must today rely almost solely on prostitutes, since I have little opportunity to meet women with whom I might have an affair. This is one of the downsides of living outside the law. But even were I on the right side of the law, and so were living contentedly in a nice suburban house with a lawn and garage and all of that, I still might find it difficult to find a woman with whom to sleep, because few women seem to want to sleep with a very old man like me without being paid to do so.
I do find this vexing, for prostitutes are an added drain on my budget - an irritating burden, since money is so hard to come by when one lives outside the law, as I'm now compelled to do.
Man On The Run
It's difficult to believe it's over a year - March of 2007 in fact - since I last wrote on this web-log, for it seems just days. This is what happens when you reach my age - 113. But the older I get, the clearer I remember my boyhood and youth in Victorian and Edwardian England. It's what I did yesterday, or even a few hours ago, that I forget.
Much has transpired since last I posted, for I've had to live in a manner I never thought possible. The fact is, I'm on the run from the police in the United States of America of all places. The reasons would take too long to explain in just one web-log posting, so over my next few postings I'll perhaps reveal more.
I'll simply say for now that it's not easy being on the run from the police, particularly since I'm an old man of 113. Were I a young whipper-snapper of 75, I'd find it much easier. But at 113 it's more difficult, if only because one needs to keep one's body in fine shape when one is constantly having to evade the police, and a 113 year old body does creak so. However, I still work out in the gym, but only every second day, for my body needs 48 hours to recover. Boxing exercises are what I like, for I was once middleweight boxing champion of the British Army. This was in 1946, just after World War 2 ended.
But I never lost interest in the Sweet Science, so I've continued doing boxing exercises in gyms throughout the years since my last official fight in 1946. You will have deduced that I wasn't champion for long, given I both won the title and retired in 1946. Why didn't I continue fighting? you may ask. Well, in 1946 I was 51, and I was having to fight opponents 30 years younger, need I say more? My last opponent was Slugger McGee I still remember. He was a 21 year old corporal in the Irish Guards, over whom I eked out a points decision. I found this humiliating, for I would have whipped McGee to a pulp had I been his age. But Father Time is unforgiving.
I'm still quite impressive in the gym, though. I regularly punch the heavy bags, and skip rope. For sparring sessions, I use my men, Mikey, Squeaky and Freddy, for they, like me, are former British Army men, and learned to box there. They are still pretty good in the ring, for it's as much as I can do to hold my own against them, since they are all still under forty. I'd like to spar with other men in the gym, for it gets boring always sparring with the same men. But the other men in the gyms I visit don't seem interested. They do watch me, though, when I spar with Mikey, Squeaky and Freddy. However, this may only be because they don't often see an old man like me wearing boxing gloves, and hitting the heavy bag and sparring.
Since this web-log is about the books I read and films I see, I wish to confirm that I still read books and watch films, but not as often as before, given my fraught circumstances. It's just that I'm often not in the mood to read and watch films because my mind is taken up with just surviving. I and my men are having to rob banks and steal food from supermarkets, for to use our credit cards and ATM machines would be to reveal our whereabouts to the police. I have to tell you, who are reading this, that you, as a law-abiding citizen, take so much for granted. Wait till you're outside the law, and you'll understand.
Till next time.
Much has transpired since last I posted, for I've had to live in a manner I never thought possible. The fact is, I'm on the run from the police in the United States of America of all places. The reasons would take too long to explain in just one web-log posting, so over my next few postings I'll perhaps reveal more.
I'll simply say for now that it's not easy being on the run from the police, particularly since I'm an old man of 113. Were I a young whipper-snapper of 75, I'd find it much easier. But at 113 it's more difficult, if only because one needs to keep one's body in fine shape when one is constantly having to evade the police, and a 113 year old body does creak so. However, I still work out in the gym, but only every second day, for my body needs 48 hours to recover. Boxing exercises are what I like, for I was once middleweight boxing champion of the British Army. This was in 1946, just after World War 2 ended.
But I never lost interest in the Sweet Science, so I've continued doing boxing exercises in gyms throughout the years since my last official fight in 1946. You will have deduced that I wasn't champion for long, given I both won the title and retired in 1946. Why didn't I continue fighting? you may ask. Well, in 1946 I was 51, and I was having to fight opponents 30 years younger, need I say more? My last opponent was Slugger McGee I still remember. He was a 21 year old corporal in the Irish Guards, over whom I eked out a points decision. I found this humiliating, for I would have whipped McGee to a pulp had I been his age. But Father Time is unforgiving.
I'm still quite impressive in the gym, though. I regularly punch the heavy bags, and skip rope. For sparring sessions, I use my men, Mikey, Squeaky and Freddy, for they, like me, are former British Army men, and learned to box there. They are still pretty good in the ring, for it's as much as I can do to hold my own against them, since they are all still under forty. I'd like to spar with other men in the gym, for it gets boring always sparring with the same men. But the other men in the gyms I visit don't seem interested. They do watch me, though, when I spar with Mikey, Squeaky and Freddy. However, this may only be because they don't often see an old man like me wearing boxing gloves, and hitting the heavy bag and sparring.
Since this web-log is about the books I read and films I see, I wish to confirm that I still read books and watch films, but not as often as before, given my fraught circumstances. It's just that I'm often not in the mood to read and watch films because my mind is taken up with just surviving. I and my men are having to rob banks and steal food from supermarkets, for to use our credit cards and ATM machines would be to reveal our whereabouts to the police. I have to tell you, who are reading this, that you, as a law-abiding citizen, take so much for granted. Wait till you're outside the law, and you'll understand.
Till next time.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Notes On A Scandal
I do apologise for not having written anything for so long. The fact is, I haven’t felt well of late. Not surprising really, given I’m 111, older probably than most of you bloggers out there. But I’m feeling well enough now thank you, to resume writing, seeing films, and reading books. Today - my first day back, as it were - I would like to tell you of the most recent film I’ve seen, “Notes on a Scandal”, that I’m sure you've heard of, since those Oscar fellows in America nominated Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett for their performances in this film.
Notes on a Scandal is about two lady teachers at this school in somewhere London, who become friends of a sort, despite that one, Sheba (Cate Blanchett) is quite young, and the other, Barbara (Judi Dench) is quite old, and that Sheba is married with children, whereas Barbara is an old maid, and well-nigh friendless, apart from her cat. So Barbara is always on the look out for anyone who might want to be her friend. Sheba is a good prospect because she’s quite new at the school, and so has been receptive to Barbara’s help and advice.
But Sheba senses Barbara’s neediness, and so keeps her at arm’s length. But she doesn’t keep at arms length one of her male pupils, a fifteen year-old, with whom she enters upon a passionate affair, conducted for the most part at the side of some railway tracks sufficiently hidden from curious passers-by. Barbara learns about it, and is consumed with jealousy because she, well, fancies Sheba. But it also gives Barbara power over Sheba because should Sheba and the young man be discovered, Sheba would be in trouble big time.
Notes on a Scandal brings out, for me, two issues. One, is how bitter and vengeful someone can be if they are unloved, as Barbara is. The second, is how our laws make no distinction in moral turpitude and criminality between a woman of thirty-seven seducing a fifteen year old boy, and a man of thirty-seven seducing a fifteen year old girl.
I do understand why a thirty-seven year old man shouldn’t seduce a fifteen year old girl for all the ordinary common-sense reasons. But a thirty-seven year old woman seducing a fifteen year old boy? I mean, what red blooded pubescent boy wouldn’t die to be seduced and bedded by a beautiful thirty-something woman?
Yes, when I was an adolescent - the age of Sheba's (Cate Blanchett's) pubescent lover in "Notes On A Scandal" - I fantasised about beautiful older women. I expect they are now dead, since they would be 135, or thereabouts, if still alive. But were they still alive and I were to encounter them, would I see behind their very old visages, the outlines of the beautiful thirty-something women they were, circa 1910?
I confess to sometimes still seeing them in my mind. In fact, despite the intervening ninety-five years, they have - in my still febrile mind - become even more desirable than they were in 1910. This isn't emotionally healthy, I know, but I do enjoy the ghostly presences of these most desirable women. So if their visitations cause me to die earlier than I otherwise would, it will have been worth it.
Notes on a Scandal is about two lady teachers at this school in somewhere London, who become friends of a sort, despite that one, Sheba (Cate Blanchett) is quite young, and the other, Barbara (Judi Dench) is quite old, and that Sheba is married with children, whereas Barbara is an old maid, and well-nigh friendless, apart from her cat. So Barbara is always on the look out for anyone who might want to be her friend. Sheba is a good prospect because she’s quite new at the school, and so has been receptive to Barbara’s help and advice.
But Sheba senses Barbara’s neediness, and so keeps her at arm’s length. But she doesn’t keep at arms length one of her male pupils, a fifteen year-old, with whom she enters upon a passionate affair, conducted for the most part at the side of some railway tracks sufficiently hidden from curious passers-by. Barbara learns about it, and is consumed with jealousy because she, well, fancies Sheba. But it also gives Barbara power over Sheba because should Sheba and the young man be discovered, Sheba would be in trouble big time.
Notes on a Scandal brings out, for me, two issues. One, is how bitter and vengeful someone can be if they are unloved, as Barbara is. The second, is how our laws make no distinction in moral turpitude and criminality between a woman of thirty-seven seducing a fifteen year old boy, and a man of thirty-seven seducing a fifteen year old girl.
I do understand why a thirty-seven year old man shouldn’t seduce a fifteen year old girl for all the ordinary common-sense reasons. But a thirty-seven year old woman seducing a fifteen year old boy? I mean, what red blooded pubescent boy wouldn’t die to be seduced and bedded by a beautiful thirty-something woman?
Yes, when I was an adolescent - the age of Sheba's (Cate Blanchett's) pubescent lover in "Notes On A Scandal" - I fantasised about beautiful older women. I expect they are now dead, since they would be 135, or thereabouts, if still alive. But were they still alive and I were to encounter them, would I see behind their very old visages, the outlines of the beautiful thirty-something women they were, circa 1910?
I confess to sometimes still seeing them in my mind. In fact, despite the intervening ninety-five years, they have - in my still febrile mind - become even more desirable than they were in 1910. This isn't emotionally healthy, I know, but I do enjoy the ghostly presences of these most desirable women. So if their visitations cause me to die earlier than I otherwise would, it will have been worth it.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Beyond The Sea
Beyond The Sea, a film about the life of Bobby Darin, is a veritable tour de force for Kevin Spacey, the film’s writer, director, performer, and chief actor. It tells Darin’s story elliptically, showing Darin directing a film about his life, a sort of story-within-a-story. It has a theatrical feel, reflecting, I suppose, Spacey’s background in theatre, a love of his re-ignited through his recent appointment as artistic director of London’s Old Vic Theatre.
Beyond The Sea is more a glimpse into what made Bobby Darin tick than anything else, or, better still, it is Spacey’s idea of him. And it’s as good an approach as any, given that Spacey - having grown up listening to his mater and pater’s voluminous bakelite record collection of the songs of Bobby Darin - had Darin’s music in his blood.
It would have been so easy for Spacey – in real life a wonderful impressionist (his impressions of the likes of Johnny Carson, Bill Clinton, and Clint Eastwood are something to behold) – simply to have done a Bobby Darin imitation. But he resisted this temptation, even ignoring that Darin, like all of us, looked different at the various stages of his life. So what we see is the forty-something Kevin Spacey looking like the forty-something Kevin Spacey playing Bobby Darin from his early twenties to when he died at age thirty-seven.
What touched me was the film’s juxtaposing the adult Bobby Darin with the young boy he once was, so that the two could talk to each other. It even made me weep, for as I watched I conjured up the young boy I had once been so long ago and who dwells within me still, to ask him how he’s doing, and to let him know I’ll always be here for him whenever he needs me.
And what also touched me was the film’s message that although Walden Robert Cassotto (Darin’s real name) is dead, Bobby Darin, through his immortal songs, still lives and will always. Yes, I did find this comforting, for, being now 111, with even my adult children now dead, I’m far beyond the time allotted for well-nigh all of us, and so expect to be recalled without ceremony by my Maker at any moment. But I hope something of me, perhaps in the incarnation of my immortal blogs, will continue to live after I’ve had my mortal coil shuffled off me, which could happen even before I’m finished writing this. So I must hurry.
***
The name, Bobby Darin, was on everyone’s lips in the late ‘50’s and very early ‘60s – when I was stationed in Washington as British Military Attache, in which position I constantly mingled with all the luminaries in the circle of John F Kennedy, and with JFK himself. So as I watched Beyond The Sea I was catapulted back to that time, the time of the New Frontier, the time of Classy Jack and the beautiful Jackie, when the sun shone brightly and we were all filled with a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.
Even after all these years, I can still see them, the Best and the Brightest in the time of Camelot – Jack, Jackie, Bobby, Ethel, Teddy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walt Rostow, George Kennan………. I attended the glittering parties, where, while drinking champagne, I conversed with America’s greatest intellects and artists, musicians and poets, novelists and philosophers, playwrights and film stars. Jackie was moulding the White House into a veritable Palace of Versailles on the Potomac, which all of the Beautiful People could call Home.
One of those Beautiful People was Marilyn Monroe. The evening we were introduced during a White House party, will forever live in my mind, for how often does one meet a screen goddess? Because it was an official White House event - and perhaps because she may have wanted to feed Jackie’s insecurities about the roving eye of Jack – Marilyn had dressed to look her best, which was calculated to turn all red-blooded men who gazed at her, to slobbering jelly.
When Marilyn began to speak with me, I was tongue-tied, for I’ve always had trouble relating to beautiful blonde women, finding them invariably snooty and vapid. But Marilyn was different, because she seemed to listen intensely to everything I said, asking me lots of questions in her breathless little-girl voice, and gazing into my eyes, as if I was the only person in the world who mattered. I wondered why, because there were so many other men there, who were much more handsome, more intelligent, and more important than me. Then she told me how she loved my English accent.
If I might digress, whenever visiting America, I’ve always found Americans to be fascinated with English accents. So, unlike many Englishmen besotted with all things American, I’ve never allowed my English accent to become infused with the American twang. When in America, I have even exaggerated my English accent, for I’ve found it a definite asset when trying to win American friends and influencing them. Why should an English accent cast this spell? Could it be that it makes the speaker sound more intelligent, and more knowledgeable, than he really is?
Given that Marilyn was attracted to intelligent and knowledgeable men – and who could have been more intelligent and knowledgeable than the likes of JFK and Arthur Miller? – and that I, with my English accent, at least appeared intelligent and knowledgeable, I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised that Marilyn might have been drawn to me. For the rest of the evening, she and I were inseparable. When we danced, she clung to me as if she were drowning, and I her lifeboat. When we weren’t dancing, she didn’t leave my side. Perhaps she was trying to make JFK jealous, for he seemed to be avoiding her.
At around midnight, the guests began to go home. Marilyn asked me if I would escort her back to the hotel suite, where she was staying while visiting Washington. When our taxi arrived at the hotel’s entrance, she asked me up for a nightcap. I hesitated because my wife, Gladys, had stayed home, and would be expecting me back at a reasonable hour. Then I thought to myself: one little drink won’t take that long…………
The following is a partial reconstruction of the next few hours, based on entries to my diary, and also on shards of memory, which floated up from deep pools of forgetfulness, as I re-read what I wrote forty-and-five years ago.
***
We’re sharing the couch, drinking coffee. Then Marilyn gets up to go to a record player, and she puts on some music - an LP of Bobby Darin’s. When she returns to the couch, I can discern those cracks in her mask, which the public are beginning to whisper about, the marks of her rumoured deep unhappiness, the legacy of her very troubled childhood, and her failed marriages and other relationships.
This is an evening in June of 1962, when Marilyn is increasingly depressed and coming apart. Doubtless this is why she seems, on this evening, to want a sympathetic listener, to whom she can talk uninhibitedly about the pain she’s in. And she does, indeed, begin talking about this, after she’s put on the Bobby Darin LP.
“It all went wrong, right from when I came into this world as Norma Jeane Mortensen ” she says, “I grew up with no father, I didn’t even know who my real father was, and my mother couldn’t cope on her own, because she was a manic depressive, and was committed to a mental institution. So I was shuttled through foster home after foster home……….God, it was awful……….”.
Her eyes become moist, and I sense a slightly manic tone to her voice, which I’ve heard in others I’ve known who are seriously depressed.
“I do so envy people”, says Marilyn, “those who had a normal childhood, with a mother and father, and a loving and secure home. In fact, I’m positively jealous of them, even angry at them. I was molested by a man at one of my foster homes. He was a friend of the family. Can you imagine that? Even today when I think about it, I just go numb”.
“When I was sixteen” she continues, “the foster parents I had at the time, wished to move east and begin a new life. Because I didn’t want to go to yet another foster home, I was encouraged to marry Jim – Jim Dougherty - the son of a neighbour. I wasn’t in love with him, but it was either him or another orphanage. Am I boring you?"
"No. Please carry on".
"Anyway, I was a dutiful wife, but I was alone much of the time, because Jim was away in the war in the merchant marines. I needed to do something, so I got a job in an aircraft factory. Then I was noticed by this army photographer, David, who was travelling around taking pictures of women contributing to the war effort. David saw I could make it as a model, and he got this modelling agency to sign me up, and that’s when things began to look up for me”.
Marilyn takes a swallow of coffee, then continues, “I’ll never forget David, for he was the one who enabled me to take my first steps out of the trap I felt myself in. I fell in love with him in fact, and we were very intimate for over two years. It doesn’t sound very nice, I know, because I was married and all, but I was lonely, and I needed love.”
“But for David” she continues “I’d be a nothing, a nobody. Now my picture was on the covers of lots of magazines. Then 20th Century Fox gave me a six month contract for $75 a week, and I felt I was on my way. I hope I’m not boring you".
"No, I'm finding this really interesting".
"But nothing came of it, well, almost nothing. They just had me hanging around learning about make-up, and costumes, and lighting, and, yes, also about acting, and I did get a few very minor roles, but it just didn’t work out, and I found myself back in the street again, doing modelling.”
"Was this when you changed your name?"
“Yes, I’d forgotten to tell you that. An agent suggested I get an alliterative name – that’s where the first letters of the two names are the same……..”
“I do know what alliterative means”.
“So I thought and thought. I’d heard of this actress called Marilyn Miller , and I liked the name, Marilyn. Then I thought of my mother’s maiden name, Monroe, and I said to myself, Marilyn Monroe, that would be perfect. I always wanted to get back into movies, and I continued cultivating my contacts in Hollywood. Meanwhile, I had to eat, and while modelling brought in money, it wasn’t enough, so I was persuaded into acting in extremely salacious movies, so salacious they could only be sold on the black market, and into having photos taken of me with no clothes, which caused me problems later on, when I became better known.”
“So I’d heard”.
“Anyway, I got a stint with Columbia Pictures, and things began to get slowly better, but only after I was talked into changing my appearance, and becoming a blonde”.
“You’re not a natural blonde?”
"I’m so flattered you think I am. I used to be a natural blonde as a little girl, but as I got older, my hair changed into an amorphous mousy colour. The studio bosses told me that if I wanted better parts, I should get my hair bleached blonde, and so I did. Immediately I noticed that people, especially men, treated me differently, paid more attention to me, just because I was now a blonde”.
“So the saying is true, that blondes have more fun?”
“Perhaps at a superficial level. It was fun at first to have men fawning all over me. It gave me a sense of power. But I soon realized they weren’t seeing who I really am, the real me. They were simply dazzled by my glitzy blonde appearance, which was also the product of cosmetic dental work, and plastic surgery to my nose and chin. I felt like a fraud, and this made me feel lonelier than I ever felt before…………”
Marilyn’s eyes again become moist, and I again make sympathetic noises. The manic timbre to her voice is still there.
After the tears abate somewhat, she says, “All my life I’ve looked for love, but have never really found it. I want to be loved for who I am, not how I look. Even if a man should love me for who I am, I get suspicious, thinking he’ll soon see me for the nothing that I am inside. Then I start acting in a way to bring this about, creating a self-fulfilled prophecy. Despite my looking and acting like a beautiful dumb blonde, I hate myself for doing this and it’s driving me to despair”.
“You’ve had brilliant and highly educated men in your life,” I say, “like your former husband, Arthur Miller, and there’s no secret about your very close friendships with JFK and Bobby, powerful intelligent and erudite men both, not to speak of the many other famous men of film and theatre you’ve been linked with. And you have periodically rebelled against the mindless dumb blonde movie roles you were given. You even quit Hollywood for a couple of years to go to New York to train with Lee Strassburg at The Actor’s Studio. So you are definitely more than just a dumb blonde”.
”Thank you for saying this. Yes, I quit Hollywood because I was tired of playing all those dumb blonde roles, which became more mindless the more famous I became. Think about the names of these movies, and you’ll get an idea of how mindless they were – ‘The Girl in Pink Tights’, ‘The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing’, and ‘How to Be Very, Very Popular’”
“Yes, I do get the idea, and very well”, I say.
“Ironically, it was my first big part which the serious critics loved, which was in a film called ‘Don’t Bother to Knock’, where I played a deranged babysitter who attacks a little girl in her care. And in my next big movie, ‘Niagara’, I played an unbalanced woman planning to murder her husband. Again, all the serious critics loved what I did. And I loved what I did too, in these first two serious roles, because I felt connected to the characters I was playing, who, like the real me, were psychological basket-cases”.
It isn’t often that someone has the courage to call him or herself a psychological basket case, and I can see that just saying these words has disturbed Marilyn, who becomes silent for a few seconds.
Then she says, “When in New York, I set up my own production company because I wanted to play better roles, and my company did eventually get to make critically acclaimed films, like’Bus Stop’ and ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’. I, myself, have always tried to become a better person, have always been a compulsive self-improver. I like always to read and study, because I never graduated from high school, which has always made me feel insecure. So whenever I feel I’m succeeding in becoming a better, more authentic person, I feel guilty, and go back to being my old false self, because, somehow, it feels more comfortable”.
“Is this why all your three marriages broke up?”
“Not really. When I married my first husband, Jim Dougherty, I was only sixteen, just a child really. And Jim himself only agreed to marry me because his mother insisted he should, since she was so sorry for me, not wanting me returned to an orphanage. I never felt like a wife when with Jim, because I would continue to play with the neighbourhood children until Jim called me home for the evening. So this marriage was doomed to fail, and it did after four years”.
Marilyn pauses, then goes on, “Then there was Joe – Joe DiMaggio – who swept me off my feet, and I thought: This is the one. Being twelve years older than me, and therefore a sort of father-figure, he was the father I’d never had. But right after we were married, I went to Korea to entertain the troops, and when Joe saw newsreels of me standing scantly dressed on a stage, in the midst of all those soldiers whistling at me, he got extremely jealous, and forbade me to do it again. He was very insecure about my fame and success, and his jealousy just kept growing, and he often beat me up.”
I don’t know what to say, other than a banal, “How awful”. Conversations like this have never been my forte.
Marilyn continues, “Even though we broke up after only nine months - Joe and I have stayed friends. He does really care for me, perhaps he’s the only man who deeply cares for me. Why, just last year, when I was put into a psychiatric clinic, that I so much wanted to get out of, but couldn’t, because I was considered so disturbed, it was Joe who secured my release. That’s a friend indeed”.
“Yes, absolutely”, I say, “And how about Arthur Miller?”
"I think that, in Arthur, who is more than ten years older than me, I was again looking for the father I’d never had, someone to rescue me from myself. But I ended up as the main breadwinner, and paying all our bills. This, together with my fame, made Arthur feel inadequate. It wasn’t a recipe for a good marriage”.
“How do you feel about JFK?”
“I’m crazy about Jack. When I sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’ to him on stage, my love for him just poured out. How I would love to be the First Lady instead of Jackie. I’d be so much better for Jack than her”.
I’m startled to hear this, but I don’t pursue it. I’m not Larry King.
Instead I say, “How about Bobby?” (This is Bobby Kennedy, not Bobby Darin)
Marilyn says, “I love Bobby, but just as a friend. He’s very sweet to me, but I don’t love him the same way I love Jack. But I’m the sort of woman who likes to have men friends who are just good and wonderful friends, to whom I can pour my heart out, like Bobby, like Monty Clift.”
I take the bull by the horns, “How about Marlon Brando, Yves Montand, Frank Sinatra? There are stories I’ve heard”.
“Yes, they are good friends too”. Marilyn doesn’t elaborate.
“How about the various directors, and other men, who helped you on your way to the top?”
”Look”, says Marilyn, “I’m sure you’re not so naïve as not to know that when we actresses are starting out in the film business, our being especially nice to directors is de rigueur”.
"Where do you think you’re going in your life right now?”
"Why do you ask?”
“Well”, I say, “you’ve been hospitalized a few times with depression, and you’ve had drug and alcohol problems, and directors have complained of your difficult behaviour on the sets of some of your recent films, like ‘The Misfits’ and ‘Something’s Got To Give’. A difficult star adds enormously to production costs, and he, or she, thus becomes someone no-one wants to hire, and no film-financier wants to finance”.
“If you’re right", says Marilyn, "how do you explain that Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra want to make a film with me? How do you explain that plans are underway for me to star in a film biography of Jean Harlow, as well as to star alongside Jack Lemmon in 'Irma La Douce', which Billy Wilder will direct? How do explain that I may be starring in ‘What a Way to Go’? And with Dean Martin and Kim Novak in ‘Kiss Me Stupid’? And how about the plans for me to star in a musical version of ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?’”. Marilyn is growing agitated.
“I stand corrected”, I say with, I hope, the requisite contrition.
Apparently mollified, Marilyn says, “But I don’t think I can ever be happy, because endogenous depression is in my blood. My mother was a manic depressive who was put in a mental institution, and certain others of my ancestors and relatives suffered mental illness. I’ll confess to you that I’m deeply depressed right now, and I don’t know where it’s going. I feel there’s no way out of this. I don’t know what to do.............”.
That is all I will reveal about what Marilyn told me that June night in 1962. Whatever else may or may not have occurred between us in the hours until the dawn broke, will remain my secret.
***
After that night, I never saw or heard from Marilyn again. Just two months later, she was found dead in her home from a drug overdose - apparently a suicide. There are so many conflicting stories surrounding her death, murder can’t be ruled out. Who might have wanted her dead?
The Kennedys for one, for Marilyn had first-hand knowledge of JFK’s marital infidelities, so that if she’d publicised them, the Kennedy presidency would have been destroyed, since America then (1962), was still much more in thrall to its puritan heritage, than today. It is now commonly known that in the weeks before Marilyn's death, JFK had severed his friendship with her, so she could no longer speak with him, or visit the White House. Perhaps this alone, made her so depressed, she no longer felt like living.
Had Marilyn lived, she would now be eighty-one. What would she have looked like, and been like, had she been allowed to grow old? for the young, blonde, and beautiful Marilyn, with her breathless little-girl way of speaking - the paradigmatic dumb blonde so worshipped in ‘50s America - is so ingrained in our collective consciousness and memory, she will always be this way, since we can’t imagine her as anything else. She is frozen in time, and with each passing year, she becomes more a goddess, whom later generations can worship, or on whom they can project their fantasies and desires.
In all I’ve read about Marilyn Monroe, and about the many men she supposedly had affairs with, I’ve come across nothing about me, or the night she and I spent together. This is as it should be, for when I took my leave of her the following morning, I asked her never to speak to anyone about our night, since I was the British Military Attache to the United States, and was therefore privy to much highly confidential information of international importance, that could be compromised through blackmail.
Remember, this was the time when the Cold War was at its apogee. So for me - a married man as well as British Military Attache - to have put myself in compromising circumstances – even if they were groundless - with a high-profile movie actress, made me a potential target for Soviet blackmailers.
Because the Cold War is now ended, and so much time and history have since passed, I feel free now to speak for the first time of that night, even though I haven’t revealed all, and never will. But I hope that even the little you do know, will add to your understanding, and to the understanding of your readers, of the many-sided and tortured person who was Marilyn Monroe.
I like to think that Jack, Jackie, Bobby, and Marilyn, are all together now, somewhere up there on the Nightshift on the Other Side, enjoying each other’s company, as much as they did when on the earthly plane, and that when I’m summoned over to the Other Side - which shouldn’t be long now – they’ll invite me to join them. ---
Beyond The Sea is more a glimpse into what made Bobby Darin tick than anything else, or, better still, it is Spacey’s idea of him. And it’s as good an approach as any, given that Spacey - having grown up listening to his mater and pater’s voluminous bakelite record collection of the songs of Bobby Darin - had Darin’s music in his blood.
It would have been so easy for Spacey – in real life a wonderful impressionist (his impressions of the likes of Johnny Carson, Bill Clinton, and Clint Eastwood are something to behold) – simply to have done a Bobby Darin imitation. But he resisted this temptation, even ignoring that Darin, like all of us, looked different at the various stages of his life. So what we see is the forty-something Kevin Spacey looking like the forty-something Kevin Spacey playing Bobby Darin from his early twenties to when he died at age thirty-seven.
What touched me was the film’s juxtaposing the adult Bobby Darin with the young boy he once was, so that the two could talk to each other. It even made me weep, for as I watched I conjured up the young boy I had once been so long ago and who dwells within me still, to ask him how he’s doing, and to let him know I’ll always be here for him whenever he needs me.
And what also touched me was the film’s message that although Walden Robert Cassotto (Darin’s real name) is dead, Bobby Darin, through his immortal songs, still lives and will always. Yes, I did find this comforting, for, being now 111, with even my adult children now dead, I’m far beyond the time allotted for well-nigh all of us, and so expect to be recalled without ceremony by my Maker at any moment. But I hope something of me, perhaps in the incarnation of my immortal blogs, will continue to live after I’ve had my mortal coil shuffled off me, which could happen even before I’m finished writing this. So I must hurry.
***
The name, Bobby Darin, was on everyone’s lips in the late ‘50’s and very early ‘60s – when I was stationed in Washington as British Military Attache, in which position I constantly mingled with all the luminaries in the circle of John F Kennedy, and with JFK himself. So as I watched Beyond The Sea I was catapulted back to that time, the time of the New Frontier, the time of Classy Jack and the beautiful Jackie, when the sun shone brightly and we were all filled with a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.
Even after all these years, I can still see them, the Best and the Brightest in the time of Camelot – Jack, Jackie, Bobby, Ethel, Teddy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walt Rostow, George Kennan………. I attended the glittering parties, where, while drinking champagne, I conversed with America’s greatest intellects and artists, musicians and poets, novelists and philosophers, playwrights and film stars. Jackie was moulding the White House into a veritable Palace of Versailles on the Potomac, which all of the Beautiful People could call Home.
One of those Beautiful People was Marilyn Monroe. The evening we were introduced during a White House party, will forever live in my mind, for how often does one meet a screen goddess? Because it was an official White House event - and perhaps because she may have wanted to feed Jackie’s insecurities about the roving eye of Jack – Marilyn had dressed to look her best, which was calculated to turn all red-blooded men who gazed at her, to slobbering jelly.
When Marilyn began to speak with me, I was tongue-tied, for I’ve always had trouble relating to beautiful blonde women, finding them invariably snooty and vapid. But Marilyn was different, because she seemed to listen intensely to everything I said, asking me lots of questions in her breathless little-girl voice, and gazing into my eyes, as if I was the only person in the world who mattered. I wondered why, because there were so many other men there, who were much more handsome, more intelligent, and more important than me. Then she told me how she loved my English accent.
If I might digress, whenever visiting America, I’ve always found Americans to be fascinated with English accents. So, unlike many Englishmen besotted with all things American, I’ve never allowed my English accent to become infused with the American twang. When in America, I have even exaggerated my English accent, for I’ve found it a definite asset when trying to win American friends and influencing them. Why should an English accent cast this spell? Could it be that it makes the speaker sound more intelligent, and more knowledgeable, than he really is?
Given that Marilyn was attracted to intelligent and knowledgeable men – and who could have been more intelligent and knowledgeable than the likes of JFK and Arthur Miller? – and that I, with my English accent, at least appeared intelligent and knowledgeable, I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised that Marilyn might have been drawn to me. For the rest of the evening, she and I were inseparable. When we danced, she clung to me as if she were drowning, and I her lifeboat. When we weren’t dancing, she didn’t leave my side. Perhaps she was trying to make JFK jealous, for he seemed to be avoiding her.
At around midnight, the guests began to go home. Marilyn asked me if I would escort her back to the hotel suite, where she was staying while visiting Washington. When our taxi arrived at the hotel’s entrance, she asked me up for a nightcap. I hesitated because my wife, Gladys, had stayed home, and would be expecting me back at a reasonable hour. Then I thought to myself: one little drink won’t take that long…………
The following is a partial reconstruction of the next few hours, based on entries to my diary, and also on shards of memory, which floated up from deep pools of forgetfulness, as I re-read what I wrote forty-and-five years ago.
***
We’re sharing the couch, drinking coffee. Then Marilyn gets up to go to a record player, and she puts on some music - an LP of Bobby Darin’s. When she returns to the couch, I can discern those cracks in her mask, which the public are beginning to whisper about, the marks of her rumoured deep unhappiness, the legacy of her very troubled childhood, and her failed marriages and other relationships.
This is an evening in June of 1962, when Marilyn is increasingly depressed and coming apart. Doubtless this is why she seems, on this evening, to want a sympathetic listener, to whom she can talk uninhibitedly about the pain she’s in. And she does, indeed, begin talking about this, after she’s put on the Bobby Darin LP.
“It all went wrong, right from when I came into this world as Norma Jeane Mortensen ” she says, “I grew up with no father, I didn’t even know who my real father was, and my mother couldn’t cope on her own, because she was a manic depressive, and was committed to a mental institution. So I was shuttled through foster home after foster home……….God, it was awful……….”.
Her eyes become moist, and I sense a slightly manic tone to her voice, which I’ve heard in others I’ve known who are seriously depressed.
“I do so envy people”, says Marilyn, “those who had a normal childhood, with a mother and father, and a loving and secure home. In fact, I’m positively jealous of them, even angry at them. I was molested by a man at one of my foster homes. He was a friend of the family. Can you imagine that? Even today when I think about it, I just go numb”.
“When I was sixteen” she continues, “the foster parents I had at the time, wished to move east and begin a new life. Because I didn’t want to go to yet another foster home, I was encouraged to marry Jim – Jim Dougherty - the son of a neighbour. I wasn’t in love with him, but it was either him or another orphanage. Am I boring you?"
"No. Please carry on".
"Anyway, I was a dutiful wife, but I was alone much of the time, because Jim was away in the war in the merchant marines. I needed to do something, so I got a job in an aircraft factory. Then I was noticed by this army photographer, David, who was travelling around taking pictures of women contributing to the war effort. David saw I could make it as a model, and he got this modelling agency to sign me up, and that’s when things began to look up for me”.
Marilyn takes a swallow of coffee, then continues, “I’ll never forget David, for he was the one who enabled me to take my first steps out of the trap I felt myself in. I fell in love with him in fact, and we were very intimate for over two years. It doesn’t sound very nice, I know, because I was married and all, but I was lonely, and I needed love.”
“But for David” she continues “I’d be a nothing, a nobody. Now my picture was on the covers of lots of magazines. Then 20th Century Fox gave me a six month contract for $75 a week, and I felt I was on my way. I hope I’m not boring you".
"No, I'm finding this really interesting".
"But nothing came of it, well, almost nothing. They just had me hanging around learning about make-up, and costumes, and lighting, and, yes, also about acting, and I did get a few very minor roles, but it just didn’t work out, and I found myself back in the street again, doing modelling.”
"Was this when you changed your name?"
“Yes, I’d forgotten to tell you that. An agent suggested I get an alliterative name – that’s where the first letters of the two names are the same……..”
“I do know what alliterative means”.
“So I thought and thought. I’d heard of this actress called Marilyn Miller , and I liked the name, Marilyn. Then I thought of my mother’s maiden name, Monroe, and I said to myself, Marilyn Monroe, that would be perfect. I always wanted to get back into movies, and I continued cultivating my contacts in Hollywood. Meanwhile, I had to eat, and while modelling brought in money, it wasn’t enough, so I was persuaded into acting in extremely salacious movies, so salacious they could only be sold on the black market, and into having photos taken of me with no clothes, which caused me problems later on, when I became better known.”
“So I’d heard”.
“Anyway, I got a stint with Columbia Pictures, and things began to get slowly better, but only after I was talked into changing my appearance, and becoming a blonde”.
“You’re not a natural blonde?”
"I’m so flattered you think I am. I used to be a natural blonde as a little girl, but as I got older, my hair changed into an amorphous mousy colour. The studio bosses told me that if I wanted better parts, I should get my hair bleached blonde, and so I did. Immediately I noticed that people, especially men, treated me differently, paid more attention to me, just because I was now a blonde”.
“So the saying is true, that blondes have more fun?”
“Perhaps at a superficial level. It was fun at first to have men fawning all over me. It gave me a sense of power. But I soon realized they weren’t seeing who I really am, the real me. They were simply dazzled by my glitzy blonde appearance, which was also the product of cosmetic dental work, and plastic surgery to my nose and chin. I felt like a fraud, and this made me feel lonelier than I ever felt before…………”
Marilyn’s eyes again become moist, and I again make sympathetic noises. The manic timbre to her voice is still there.
After the tears abate somewhat, she says, “All my life I’ve looked for love, but have never really found it. I want to be loved for who I am, not how I look. Even if a man should love me for who I am, I get suspicious, thinking he’ll soon see me for the nothing that I am inside. Then I start acting in a way to bring this about, creating a self-fulfilled prophecy. Despite my looking and acting like a beautiful dumb blonde, I hate myself for doing this and it’s driving me to despair”.
“You’ve had brilliant and highly educated men in your life,” I say, “like your former husband, Arthur Miller, and there’s no secret about your very close friendships with JFK and Bobby, powerful intelligent and erudite men both, not to speak of the many other famous men of film and theatre you’ve been linked with. And you have periodically rebelled against the mindless dumb blonde movie roles you were given. You even quit Hollywood for a couple of years to go to New York to train with Lee Strassburg at The Actor’s Studio. So you are definitely more than just a dumb blonde”.
”Thank you for saying this. Yes, I quit Hollywood because I was tired of playing all those dumb blonde roles, which became more mindless the more famous I became. Think about the names of these movies, and you’ll get an idea of how mindless they were – ‘The Girl in Pink Tights’, ‘The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing’, and ‘How to Be Very, Very Popular’”
“Yes, I do get the idea, and very well”, I say.
“Ironically, it was my first big part which the serious critics loved, which was in a film called ‘Don’t Bother to Knock’, where I played a deranged babysitter who attacks a little girl in her care. And in my next big movie, ‘Niagara’, I played an unbalanced woman planning to murder her husband. Again, all the serious critics loved what I did. And I loved what I did too, in these first two serious roles, because I felt connected to the characters I was playing, who, like the real me, were psychological basket-cases”.
It isn’t often that someone has the courage to call him or herself a psychological basket case, and I can see that just saying these words has disturbed Marilyn, who becomes silent for a few seconds.
Then she says, “When in New York, I set up my own production company because I wanted to play better roles, and my company did eventually get to make critically acclaimed films, like’Bus Stop’ and ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’. I, myself, have always tried to become a better person, have always been a compulsive self-improver. I like always to read and study, because I never graduated from high school, which has always made me feel insecure. So whenever I feel I’m succeeding in becoming a better, more authentic person, I feel guilty, and go back to being my old false self, because, somehow, it feels more comfortable”.
“Is this why all your three marriages broke up?”
“Not really. When I married my first husband, Jim Dougherty, I was only sixteen, just a child really. And Jim himself only agreed to marry me because his mother insisted he should, since she was so sorry for me, not wanting me returned to an orphanage. I never felt like a wife when with Jim, because I would continue to play with the neighbourhood children until Jim called me home for the evening. So this marriage was doomed to fail, and it did after four years”.
Marilyn pauses, then goes on, “Then there was Joe – Joe DiMaggio – who swept me off my feet, and I thought: This is the one. Being twelve years older than me, and therefore a sort of father-figure, he was the father I’d never had. But right after we were married, I went to Korea to entertain the troops, and when Joe saw newsreels of me standing scantly dressed on a stage, in the midst of all those soldiers whistling at me, he got extremely jealous, and forbade me to do it again. He was very insecure about my fame and success, and his jealousy just kept growing, and he often beat me up.”
I don’t know what to say, other than a banal, “How awful”. Conversations like this have never been my forte.
Marilyn continues, “Even though we broke up after only nine months - Joe and I have stayed friends. He does really care for me, perhaps he’s the only man who deeply cares for me. Why, just last year, when I was put into a psychiatric clinic, that I so much wanted to get out of, but couldn’t, because I was considered so disturbed, it was Joe who secured my release. That’s a friend indeed”.
“Yes, absolutely”, I say, “And how about Arthur Miller?”
"I think that, in Arthur, who is more than ten years older than me, I was again looking for the father I’d never had, someone to rescue me from myself. But I ended up as the main breadwinner, and paying all our bills. This, together with my fame, made Arthur feel inadequate. It wasn’t a recipe for a good marriage”.
“How do you feel about JFK?”
“I’m crazy about Jack. When I sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’ to him on stage, my love for him just poured out. How I would love to be the First Lady instead of Jackie. I’d be so much better for Jack than her”.
I’m startled to hear this, but I don’t pursue it. I’m not Larry King.
Instead I say, “How about Bobby?” (This is Bobby Kennedy, not Bobby Darin)
Marilyn says, “I love Bobby, but just as a friend. He’s very sweet to me, but I don’t love him the same way I love Jack. But I’m the sort of woman who likes to have men friends who are just good and wonderful friends, to whom I can pour my heart out, like Bobby, like Monty Clift.”
I take the bull by the horns, “How about Marlon Brando, Yves Montand, Frank Sinatra? There are stories I’ve heard”.
“Yes, they are good friends too”. Marilyn doesn’t elaborate.
“How about the various directors, and other men, who helped you on your way to the top?”
”Look”, says Marilyn, “I’m sure you’re not so naïve as not to know that when we actresses are starting out in the film business, our being especially nice to directors is de rigueur”.
"Where do you think you’re going in your life right now?”
"Why do you ask?”
“Well”, I say, “you’ve been hospitalized a few times with depression, and you’ve had drug and alcohol problems, and directors have complained of your difficult behaviour on the sets of some of your recent films, like ‘The Misfits’ and ‘Something’s Got To Give’. A difficult star adds enormously to production costs, and he, or she, thus becomes someone no-one wants to hire, and no film-financier wants to finance”.
“If you’re right", says Marilyn, "how do you explain that Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra want to make a film with me? How do you explain that plans are underway for me to star in a film biography of Jean Harlow, as well as to star alongside Jack Lemmon in 'Irma La Douce', which Billy Wilder will direct? How do explain that I may be starring in ‘What a Way to Go’? And with Dean Martin and Kim Novak in ‘Kiss Me Stupid’? And how about the plans for me to star in a musical version of ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?’”. Marilyn is growing agitated.
“I stand corrected”, I say with, I hope, the requisite contrition.
Apparently mollified, Marilyn says, “But I don’t think I can ever be happy, because endogenous depression is in my blood. My mother was a manic depressive who was put in a mental institution, and certain others of my ancestors and relatives suffered mental illness. I’ll confess to you that I’m deeply depressed right now, and I don’t know where it’s going. I feel there’s no way out of this. I don’t know what to do.............”.
That is all I will reveal about what Marilyn told me that June night in 1962. Whatever else may or may not have occurred between us in the hours until the dawn broke, will remain my secret.
***
After that night, I never saw or heard from Marilyn again. Just two months later, she was found dead in her home from a drug overdose - apparently a suicide. There are so many conflicting stories surrounding her death, murder can’t be ruled out. Who might have wanted her dead?
The Kennedys for one, for Marilyn had first-hand knowledge of JFK’s marital infidelities, so that if she’d publicised them, the Kennedy presidency would have been destroyed, since America then (1962), was still much more in thrall to its puritan heritage, than today. It is now commonly known that in the weeks before Marilyn's death, JFK had severed his friendship with her, so she could no longer speak with him, or visit the White House. Perhaps this alone, made her so depressed, she no longer felt like living.
Had Marilyn lived, she would now be eighty-one. What would she have looked like, and been like, had she been allowed to grow old? for the young, blonde, and beautiful Marilyn, with her breathless little-girl way of speaking - the paradigmatic dumb blonde so worshipped in ‘50s America - is so ingrained in our collective consciousness and memory, she will always be this way, since we can’t imagine her as anything else. She is frozen in time, and with each passing year, she becomes more a goddess, whom later generations can worship, or on whom they can project their fantasies and desires.
In all I’ve read about Marilyn Monroe, and about the many men she supposedly had affairs with, I’ve come across nothing about me, or the night she and I spent together. This is as it should be, for when I took my leave of her the following morning, I asked her never to speak to anyone about our night, since I was the British Military Attache to the United States, and was therefore privy to much highly confidential information of international importance, that could be compromised through blackmail.
Remember, this was the time when the Cold War was at its apogee. So for me - a married man as well as British Military Attache - to have put myself in compromising circumstances – even if they were groundless - with a high-profile movie actress, made me a potential target for Soviet blackmailers.
Because the Cold War is now ended, and so much time and history have since passed, I feel free now to speak for the first time of that night, even though I haven’t revealed all, and never will. But I hope that even the little you do know, will add to your understanding, and to the understanding of your readers, of the many-sided and tortured person who was Marilyn Monroe.
I like to think that Jack, Jackie, Bobby, and Marilyn, are all together now, somewhere up there on the Nightshift on the Other Side, enjoying each other’s company, as much as they did when on the earthly plane, and that when I’m summoned over to the Other Side - which shouldn’t be long now – they’ll invite me to join them. ---
Saturday, July 15, 2006
My Summer Of Love
The title of this piece doesn’t, unfortunately, describe how my summer has gone so far, for I might better describe it as “My Summer of Lovelessness”. Somehow the feelings of love I have for the diminishing number of beautiful and desirable women I know are not reciprocated by them. Is it their contemplation of my 111 year-old body which puts them off?
I should explain that “My Summer of Love” is a film I saw quite recently. It is about two teenaged girls - from family backgrounds as disparate as you can imagine - who meet one sunny summer’s day in the English countryside. One is from the landed gentry, the posh daughter of a mater and pater whose palatial home has acres of lawned gardens and a tennis court. The other is an orphan - a very working-class inarticulate orphan - who lives in a village pub run by her brother, a quondam inmate of one of Her Majesty’s prisons who has turned to Christ for comfort and succour.
The first meeting between the two girls is accidental. The poor one - the one who lives in the country pub - has fallen off her bicycle, and as she lies dazed on the ground she looks up to see a horse, whose rider – the rich girl – is looking down at her with concern. But you can tell by how intensely they look at each other that there are stirrings of something-or-other in their gutty-wutzes.
We shouldn’t be surprised, because each is loveless and lonely in her own way. The poor girl has just been unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend, and the rich girl lives isolatedly in a big house with her mater and pater who, being quintessentially upper-class English, are emotionally distant, though polite. So you don’t have to be, like, a rocket scientist to understand why the girls were susceptible to looks of longing from the other.
This, then, is the bare bones of “My Summer of Love”, the plot of which I won’t tell you more of lest you go see it, which I recommend you do, unless you are a Bruce Willis and Special Effects fan, in which case you should give “My Summer of Love” a miss.
But while watching “My Summer of Love” I did have......how shall I say?........thoughts running through my old head. As I gazed at the two girls doing stuff with each other that two girls together don't normally do unless they have extreme passion for each other, I asked myself if they were in fact lesbian? After much cogitating I concluded they weren’t, because they were looking more for emotional closeness and affection than anything else, and it just happened to transmute into something physical. And speaking generally, perhaps it is the need of women for tenderness and sensitivity in lovemaking – something most of us men don’t seem able to supply - that draws so many women together in physical relationships with each other, as happened with the two young women in the film.
I speak from personal experience because from very early on in our marriage my wife Gladys always reacted with distaste whenever I demanded my conjugal rights. She did have a close woman friend with whom she seemed a different person - smiling and laughing and touching and all of that - whenever I saw them together. One day I came home when not expected, and when I entered our bedroom there Gladys and her friend were, under the blankets entwined in a passionate embrace and I discerned from garments scattered on the floor that they were naked.
I experienced a deja vu since, as I’ve told of in a previous piece, I had once before caught Gladys in bed with one of my fellow army officers. But at least he was a man. However, when I caught Gladys with her woman friend it was as much as I could endure, for had it got around my social circle that a woman could satisfy Gladys more than I could, I would have had to commit suicide to protect my honour.
We hushed everything up so no-one outside the three of us knew what happened on that long ago afternoon in a far tropical corner of the world that formed the British Empire. It is only now, with Gladys and her friend long and safely dead, that I can speak of this. And I've never spoken of it since, until now, so consider yourself privileged.
My conjugal activities with Gladys more or less ceased after that, except during those times when other women weren’t around for me to slake my lust.
I should explain that “My Summer of Love” is a film I saw quite recently. It is about two teenaged girls - from family backgrounds as disparate as you can imagine - who meet one sunny summer’s day in the English countryside. One is from the landed gentry, the posh daughter of a mater and pater whose palatial home has acres of lawned gardens and a tennis court. The other is an orphan - a very working-class inarticulate orphan - who lives in a village pub run by her brother, a quondam inmate of one of Her Majesty’s prisons who has turned to Christ for comfort and succour.
The first meeting between the two girls is accidental. The poor one - the one who lives in the country pub - has fallen off her bicycle, and as she lies dazed on the ground she looks up to see a horse, whose rider – the rich girl – is looking down at her with concern. But you can tell by how intensely they look at each other that there are stirrings of something-or-other in their gutty-wutzes.
We shouldn’t be surprised, because each is loveless and lonely in her own way. The poor girl has just been unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend, and the rich girl lives isolatedly in a big house with her mater and pater who, being quintessentially upper-class English, are emotionally distant, though polite. So you don’t have to be, like, a rocket scientist to understand why the girls were susceptible to looks of longing from the other.
This, then, is the bare bones of “My Summer of Love”, the plot of which I won’t tell you more of lest you go see it, which I recommend you do, unless you are a Bruce Willis and Special Effects fan, in which case you should give “My Summer of Love” a miss.
But while watching “My Summer of Love” I did have......how shall I say?........thoughts running through my old head. As I gazed at the two girls doing stuff with each other that two girls together don't normally do unless they have extreme passion for each other, I asked myself if they were in fact lesbian? After much cogitating I concluded they weren’t, because they were looking more for emotional closeness and affection than anything else, and it just happened to transmute into something physical. And speaking generally, perhaps it is the need of women for tenderness and sensitivity in lovemaking – something most of us men don’t seem able to supply - that draws so many women together in physical relationships with each other, as happened with the two young women in the film.
I speak from personal experience because from very early on in our marriage my wife Gladys always reacted with distaste whenever I demanded my conjugal rights. She did have a close woman friend with whom she seemed a different person - smiling and laughing and touching and all of that - whenever I saw them together. One day I came home when not expected, and when I entered our bedroom there Gladys and her friend were, under the blankets entwined in a passionate embrace and I discerned from garments scattered on the floor that they were naked.
I experienced a deja vu since, as I’ve told of in a previous piece, I had once before caught Gladys in bed with one of my fellow army officers. But at least he was a man. However, when I caught Gladys with her woman friend it was as much as I could endure, for had it got around my social circle that a woman could satisfy Gladys more than I could, I would have had to commit suicide to protect my honour.
We hushed everything up so no-one outside the three of us knew what happened on that long ago afternoon in a far tropical corner of the world that formed the British Empire. It is only now, with Gladys and her friend long and safely dead, that I can speak of this. And I've never spoken of it since, until now, so consider yourself privileged.
My conjugal activities with Gladys more or less ceased after that, except during those times when other women weren’t around for me to slake my lust.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Joyeux Noel
Joyeux Noel is a Christmas film to warm the cockles of your heart, which, since the film was made in 2005, should make you Americans out there wonder why it wasn’t shown in all the theatres near you in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave this last Christmas, instead of dreck like “Meet the Fockers” that Hollywood normally puts out at that festive time. Could the problem have been that Joyeux Noel is, like, foreign, which is to say, not American?
Well, I should tell you that Joyeux Noel is about the fraternizing on Christmas Day 1914 between soldiers of the two warring sides who were systematically wiping each other out in the trenches of World War 1. In several sections of the line the soldiers spontaneously climbed out of their muddy trenches and celebrated the first Christmas Day of the war with the enemy without the higher-ups knowing. Together they sang hymns, drank booze, and talked. Then at the day’s end they went back to their respective trenches and resumed shooting, shelling, and bayoneting each other.
As I watched Joyeux Noel I began unashamedly to weep, and if my fellow patrons in the theatre were disconcerted by my snuffling and sobbing, that was too bad because it brought back my memories of the last day and night I spent with Lucille, the girl I was passionately and deeply in love with in the summer of 1917, when it seemed that the war would never end.
Lucille. I can see her now, even after nearly ninety years, her soulful dark eyes, light-brown skin, beautiful slender body, and long luscious black hair. She was colonial French, from Martinique, and was studying English in London. We first met at a soiree one evening at the house of a mutual friend, and when I saw her I couldn’t stop looking into her eyes, and she couldn’t stop looking into mine. It was the love at first sight, to end all loves at first sight.
We drifted together as on air over to a window where we could look down at the streetlights whose orbs we could barely see in the foggy darkness outside. Then we began to talk and talk, and we were soon sharing inner secrets that we’d told no-one else before. She drew it all out of me, as I drew it all out of her. I felt in the core of my being that we were soulmates. At the end of the evening, Lucille and I took each other’s hands and we arranged to meet the next afternoon for a walk through Hyde Park. We didn’t embrace, though. Strange, you might say, seeing as we were deeply attracted to each other. But you forget, this was 1917, not 2006.
I returned home after the soiree and my heart was singing, for I knew I’d found the love of my life. Then I was assailed with gloomy thoughts, since I was destined for France with my army battalion within a month, and my enthusiasm to go to the front and kick hell out of the Huns seemed now sort of silly, for it would take me away from Lucille. And, I might die in France.
I drifted into a delicious sleep that night, thinking only of Lucille.
When I espied her the next afternoon at our rendezvous in Hyde Park my heart was yammering so much that I thought I might have a heart attack, but I acted insouciantly, and she, too. But we were both trembling when our hands met and we commenced our walk. When we thought no-one was looking, our arms went around each other and we embraced madly, passionately. Then we would pull apart and walk nonchalantly.
Throughout that afternoon and evening Lucille and I were inseparable. We talked about anything and everything, and we held hands and laughed and embraced. I did notice frowns of disapproval from other strollers, but, to repeat, this was 1917, not 2006. It was as much as we could do to separate after I walked her home. We agreed to meet again the next day………then the day after that……..then the day after the day after that…………..
* * *
Then came the day I received my orders to go to France. I got them on a Friday, and I was to embark on the Sunday evening, just thirty-six hours after, and under cover of darkness, for German U-boats were lurking in the waters of the English Channel. My first thoughts were of Lucille, and that we might never see other again after Sunday. When I told her, her face took on an expression of such sadness I thought my heart would break. I tried to re-assure her. The Germans are on their last legs, I said. So I’ll soon be home again, and completely unscathed, I said. But this didn’t cheer her up, not one bit. I held her closely, and she held me, and she began to weep, and so did I. We would have just one day and one evening more together on the Saturday, for on Sunday I would be travelling to Dover for the troop ship to France.
A heaviness hung over us all that Saturday as we walked London’s streets and stopped off in pubs. For long periods we would say nothing, and if we said anything it sounded formal and forced. Then I said to Lucille, let’s get a hotel room and spend tonight together. Please, I said, if you love me, you’ll do this. Much to my surprise, she agreed, and readily. Should I have been surprised? Perhaps not, when I think back on it, given that we were at war, and in times of war we do things we don’t do when there’s no war.
To those of you who are saying: What was the big deal about what Lucille and I had agreed to do that last night, I repeat yet again, this was 1917, not 2006.
* * *
For reasons of decency and discretion I will say nothing of our night of love, except that was a night of unbridled passion, and a night I will cherish in my memory until that moment when I breathe my last.
The nearer dawn came, the more our precious hours became precious minutes, the more our precious minutes became precious seconds. Finally it was morning and we could dwell in each others arms no more.
I walked Lucille through the early morning streets, back to her front door, and, with tears running down our cheeks, we held each other and embraced one final time before she went in. I drank in her face and body each second before her door closed finally ……….
* * *
I wallowed in the trenches of France for over a year, miraculously unscathed, until in November 1918 Kaiser Bill called it quits, and the guns fell silent. While over there I had received letters from Lucille, and then they stopped. I wrote to her, asking why, but I received nothing back. On returning to England the first thing I did was visit the flat where Lucille lived. But the man who answered the door said she had moved out long ago, and he thought it was back to Martinique. He said she had left with a man who, judging by the affectionate way he spoke to Lucille and touched her, would not have been her brother or cousin or uncle or father.
On hearing this I was overcome by a numb angry feeling. Had I risked my life for King and Country in the most indescribable conditions imaginable, only to be betrayed by the woman I loved with a passion with which I’ve loved no other woman since, not even my wife? I walked down the street seeing nothing. I entered the first pub I came across, and I drank and I drank and I drank. For some months I was so shattered that I lived only to drink and to visit houses of ill repute. Slowly, but very slowly the bleeding from the raw wound of Lucille’s betrayal began to ease, then to stop.
But the scar tissue from the wound still sometimes opens, like when I see films like Joyeux Noel.
Oh Lucille, where are you that I might again see you, speak with you…………….?
Well, I should tell you that Joyeux Noel is about the fraternizing on Christmas Day 1914 between soldiers of the two warring sides who were systematically wiping each other out in the trenches of World War 1. In several sections of the line the soldiers spontaneously climbed out of their muddy trenches and celebrated the first Christmas Day of the war with the enemy without the higher-ups knowing. Together they sang hymns, drank booze, and talked. Then at the day’s end they went back to their respective trenches and resumed shooting, shelling, and bayoneting each other.
As I watched Joyeux Noel I began unashamedly to weep, and if my fellow patrons in the theatre were disconcerted by my snuffling and sobbing, that was too bad because it brought back my memories of the last day and night I spent with Lucille, the girl I was passionately and deeply in love with in the summer of 1917, when it seemed that the war would never end.
Lucille. I can see her now, even after nearly ninety years, her soulful dark eyes, light-brown skin, beautiful slender body, and long luscious black hair. She was colonial French, from Martinique, and was studying English in London. We first met at a soiree one evening at the house of a mutual friend, and when I saw her I couldn’t stop looking into her eyes, and she couldn’t stop looking into mine. It was the love at first sight, to end all loves at first sight.
We drifted together as on air over to a window where we could look down at the streetlights whose orbs we could barely see in the foggy darkness outside. Then we began to talk and talk, and we were soon sharing inner secrets that we’d told no-one else before. She drew it all out of me, as I drew it all out of her. I felt in the core of my being that we were soulmates. At the end of the evening, Lucille and I took each other’s hands and we arranged to meet the next afternoon for a walk through Hyde Park. We didn’t embrace, though. Strange, you might say, seeing as we were deeply attracted to each other. But you forget, this was 1917, not 2006.
I returned home after the soiree and my heart was singing, for I knew I’d found the love of my life. Then I was assailed with gloomy thoughts, since I was destined for France with my army battalion within a month, and my enthusiasm to go to the front and kick hell out of the Huns seemed now sort of silly, for it would take me away from Lucille. And, I might die in France.
I drifted into a delicious sleep that night, thinking only of Lucille.
When I espied her the next afternoon at our rendezvous in Hyde Park my heart was yammering so much that I thought I might have a heart attack, but I acted insouciantly, and she, too. But we were both trembling when our hands met and we commenced our walk. When we thought no-one was looking, our arms went around each other and we embraced madly, passionately. Then we would pull apart and walk nonchalantly.
Throughout that afternoon and evening Lucille and I were inseparable. We talked about anything and everything, and we held hands and laughed and embraced. I did notice frowns of disapproval from other strollers, but, to repeat, this was 1917, not 2006. It was as much as we could do to separate after I walked her home. We agreed to meet again the next day………then the day after that……..then the day after the day after that…………..
* * *
Then came the day I received my orders to go to France. I got them on a Friday, and I was to embark on the Sunday evening, just thirty-six hours after, and under cover of darkness, for German U-boats were lurking in the waters of the English Channel. My first thoughts were of Lucille, and that we might never see other again after Sunday. When I told her, her face took on an expression of such sadness I thought my heart would break. I tried to re-assure her. The Germans are on their last legs, I said. So I’ll soon be home again, and completely unscathed, I said. But this didn’t cheer her up, not one bit. I held her closely, and she held me, and she began to weep, and so did I. We would have just one day and one evening more together on the Saturday, for on Sunday I would be travelling to Dover for the troop ship to France.
A heaviness hung over us all that Saturday as we walked London’s streets and stopped off in pubs. For long periods we would say nothing, and if we said anything it sounded formal and forced. Then I said to Lucille, let’s get a hotel room and spend tonight together. Please, I said, if you love me, you’ll do this. Much to my surprise, she agreed, and readily. Should I have been surprised? Perhaps not, when I think back on it, given that we were at war, and in times of war we do things we don’t do when there’s no war.
To those of you who are saying: What was the big deal about what Lucille and I had agreed to do that last night, I repeat yet again, this was 1917, not 2006.
* * *
For reasons of decency and discretion I will say nothing of our night of love, except that was a night of unbridled passion, and a night I will cherish in my memory until that moment when I breathe my last.
The nearer dawn came, the more our precious hours became precious minutes, the more our precious minutes became precious seconds. Finally it was morning and we could dwell in each others arms no more.
I walked Lucille through the early morning streets, back to her front door, and, with tears running down our cheeks, we held each other and embraced one final time before she went in. I drank in her face and body each second before her door closed finally ……….
* * *
I wallowed in the trenches of France for over a year, miraculously unscathed, until in November 1918 Kaiser Bill called it quits, and the guns fell silent. While over there I had received letters from Lucille, and then they stopped. I wrote to her, asking why, but I received nothing back. On returning to England the first thing I did was visit the flat where Lucille lived. But the man who answered the door said she had moved out long ago, and he thought it was back to Martinique. He said she had left with a man who, judging by the affectionate way he spoke to Lucille and touched her, would not have been her brother or cousin or uncle or father.
On hearing this I was overcome by a numb angry feeling. Had I risked my life for King and Country in the most indescribable conditions imaginable, only to be betrayed by the woman I loved with a passion with which I’ve loved no other woman since, not even my wife? I walked down the street seeing nothing. I entered the first pub I came across, and I drank and I drank and I drank. For some months I was so shattered that I lived only to drink and to visit houses of ill repute. Slowly, but very slowly the bleeding from the raw wound of Lucille’s betrayal began to ease, then to stop.
But the scar tissue from the wound still sometimes opens, like when I see films like Joyeux Noel.
Oh Lucille, where are you that I might again see you, speak with you…………….?
Monday, April 03, 2006
The Dogs of Babel
“The Dogs of Babel”, a novel by Carolyn Parkhurst, was the second book I read this year. Or was it the third? Or fourth? My memory isn’t what it was. But that I read it is what’s important.
"The Dogs of Babel” concerns the death of a thirty-something married woman who had fallen out of a tall tree in her backyard. Was it an accident, or a suicide? The trouble is, no-one saw her fall except her dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, that was whining next to her body when her husband discovered it on returning from work. Suicide? Unlikely, since she’d always seemed happy and fulfilled to all who knew her, including her husband.
But his doubts grow as he reads through her journals and remembers certain incidents over the years which, if looked at from a different light, bespoke that she was considerably troubled. But he’d thought nothing of them at the time. So she hadn’t, like, communicated with him, about what was going on with her. Why ever not? Was she in such emotional pain that she couldn’t imagine him being able to understand it? Since she told no-one else either about her inner pain, she must have despaired that anyone would understand.
The husband spends much time and tries ingenious means to get the dog to communicate something about what it saw, but to no avail. So it has knowledge inside its head that will never see the light of day simply because it has no means of communicating it. Thus the dog has information that is as locked inside its mind, as the information that had been locked inside the mind of its mistress.
“The Dogs of Babel” presents us with the question of how well we know anyone. Even our nearest and dearest can have dark secrets we don’t sense. Is it because they have so effectively covered it up that we don’t notice? Or that we don’t want to notice, or have become incapable of doing so because we’ve become so indifferent to them? Many are the accounts of sons or daughters or mothers or fathers or husbands or wives killing themselves for no apparent reason, and those closest to them had no inkling of the inner pain the deceased must have been in.
As I write this, I’m remembering when I was stationed in the Straights Settlements of Malaya in the 1930s. I came home one afternoon to discover my wife in bed with one of my fellow army officers. I opened the door to our bedroom and there they were. I was in such shock that I seemed to leave my body and float above it. My brother officer gathered his things and fled before I could recover and give him the thrashing he deserved.
When I came to, I strode down to the bar of the Officer’s Club and downed a number of gins and tonics. My beloved Gladys, the erstwhile girl who I worshipped with my body and soul, how could she do this to me? She’d seemed always happy, well, apart from the occasional times she wouldn’t speak to me, acting coldly many days on end. I put it down to the monthly you-know-what, and thought no more about it. Whenever I'd demanded my conjugal rights, she was most times compliant, and sometimes even uttered cries of ecstasy during our transports of passion. Well, I assumed it was ecstasy, for , since I considered myself a great lover, how could her cries have been other than those of the purest bliss? Could she have faked it? I thought not. But when I think back on it, it may not have been impossible, because you know what women are.
I’ll talk no more of this for now, for Gladys's infidelity, besides its besmirching of the image of the English colonists in the eyes of the Natives, was just not cricket. It showed that we all – and this includes you - carry secrets we don’t utter even to our nearest and dearest.
"The Dogs of Babel” concerns the death of a thirty-something married woman who had fallen out of a tall tree in her backyard. Was it an accident, or a suicide? The trouble is, no-one saw her fall except her dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, that was whining next to her body when her husband discovered it on returning from work. Suicide? Unlikely, since she’d always seemed happy and fulfilled to all who knew her, including her husband.
But his doubts grow as he reads through her journals and remembers certain incidents over the years which, if looked at from a different light, bespoke that she was considerably troubled. But he’d thought nothing of them at the time. So she hadn’t, like, communicated with him, about what was going on with her. Why ever not? Was she in such emotional pain that she couldn’t imagine him being able to understand it? Since she told no-one else either about her inner pain, she must have despaired that anyone would understand.
The husband spends much time and tries ingenious means to get the dog to communicate something about what it saw, but to no avail. So it has knowledge inside its head that will never see the light of day simply because it has no means of communicating it. Thus the dog has information that is as locked inside its mind, as the information that had been locked inside the mind of its mistress.
“The Dogs of Babel” presents us with the question of how well we know anyone. Even our nearest and dearest can have dark secrets we don’t sense. Is it because they have so effectively covered it up that we don’t notice? Or that we don’t want to notice, or have become incapable of doing so because we’ve become so indifferent to them? Many are the accounts of sons or daughters or mothers or fathers or husbands or wives killing themselves for no apparent reason, and those closest to them had no inkling of the inner pain the deceased must have been in.
As I write this, I’m remembering when I was stationed in the Straights Settlements of Malaya in the 1930s. I came home one afternoon to discover my wife in bed with one of my fellow army officers. I opened the door to our bedroom and there they were. I was in such shock that I seemed to leave my body and float above it. My brother officer gathered his things and fled before I could recover and give him the thrashing he deserved.
When I came to, I strode down to the bar of the Officer’s Club and downed a number of gins and tonics. My beloved Gladys, the erstwhile girl who I worshipped with my body and soul, how could she do this to me? She’d seemed always happy, well, apart from the occasional times she wouldn’t speak to me, acting coldly many days on end. I put it down to the monthly you-know-what, and thought no more about it. Whenever I'd demanded my conjugal rights, she was most times compliant, and sometimes even uttered cries of ecstasy during our transports of passion. Well, I assumed it was ecstasy, for , since I considered myself a great lover, how could her cries have been other than those of the purest bliss? Could she have faked it? I thought not. But when I think back on it, it may not have been impossible, because you know what women are.
I’ll talk no more of this for now, for Gladys's infidelity, besides its besmirching of the image of the English colonists in the eyes of the Natives, was just not cricket. It showed that we all – and this includes you - carry secrets we don’t utter even to our nearest and dearest.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Reading Lolita In Tehran
“Reading Lolita in Tehran” is the first book I finished this year, although I began on it last year, which is to say 2005. It is by Azar Nafisi who, until 1999, was professor of English at Tehran University (that’s in Iran, in case you cretins didn’t know). At that point she'd had enough of revolutionary Iran, so she packed her bags for the USA, where she now teaches at Princeton.
Ms Nafisi, who was, for the most part, educated in the USA, and so became quite American in her values, returned to Iran full of idealism when the Ayatollah Khomeini took over in 1979. After the initial euphoria at the Shah’s departure, the new rulers showed themselves even more repressive than the hated Shah. Individual freedoms, particularly those of women, were whittled away, and eventually they were told to wear the veil – or else. For Ms Nafisi the “or else” meant losing her job as professor if she didn’t knuckle under. Well, she didn’t, and, after much pleading from the university authorities that she relent, was fired.
What to do? On the principle that if Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed, Ms Nafisi, out of her love for literature, particularly of the Western canon, arranged that five of her most dedicated women students came to her house on two afternoons a week to study and discuss important works of Western, particularly American, literature, including Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Nabokov’s “Lolita”.
It seems odd that they would do this in Iran during the heyday of the Ayatolla Khomeini. What could be more irrelevant? But being engrossed in literature was as good a way as any for Nafisi and her students to block their ears to the madness of that time. And since great literature is timeless, studying it helped Azar Nafisi and her five students understand better what was going on at that time.
Even so, what, you may ask, could Lolita, about a middle-aged man’s obsession with a pre-pubescent girl, have anything to do with a revolutionary Iran in the grip of the Ayatollah Khomeini? How about that the all-controlling Humbert represented the totalitarian government of Iran, and the hapless Loita the ordinary Iranian people? And what about The Great Gatsby, that appeared to glorify the rich, the class against which the government’s and people’s ire was directed? Well, through discussing and arguing about Gatsby and what it means, the five young women were able to see that the rich in The Great Gatsby were a selfish and duplicitous bunch, and so were portrayed in anything but a favourable light.
“Reading Lolita in Tehran” makes us see that the Iranian revolution was, in fact, a war against women, particularly against their sexuality, which the exclusively male leadership regarded as a threat to men. Therefore women had to be covered up, for, their showing too much flesh got males all aquiver, sapping their moral fibre. One young woman was even hauled in by the police for eating an apple too seductively.
“Reading Lolita in Tehran”, apart from giving us a graphic portrayal of what life in Iran was like for women, is also a paean to the universally redemptive power of literature, and makes us want to haul out our mouldering copies of Lolita and The Great Gatsby and re-read them right now.
Ms Nafisi, who was, for the most part, educated in the USA, and so became quite American in her values, returned to Iran full of idealism when the Ayatollah Khomeini took over in 1979. After the initial euphoria at the Shah’s departure, the new rulers showed themselves even more repressive than the hated Shah. Individual freedoms, particularly those of women, were whittled away, and eventually they were told to wear the veil – or else. For Ms Nafisi the “or else” meant losing her job as professor if she didn’t knuckle under. Well, she didn’t, and, after much pleading from the university authorities that she relent, was fired.
What to do? On the principle that if Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed, Ms Nafisi, out of her love for literature, particularly of the Western canon, arranged that five of her most dedicated women students came to her house on two afternoons a week to study and discuss important works of Western, particularly American, literature, including Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Nabokov’s “Lolita”.
It seems odd that they would do this in Iran during the heyday of the Ayatolla Khomeini. What could be more irrelevant? But being engrossed in literature was as good a way as any for Nafisi and her students to block their ears to the madness of that time. And since great literature is timeless, studying it helped Azar Nafisi and her five students understand better what was going on at that time.
Even so, what, you may ask, could Lolita, about a middle-aged man’s obsession with a pre-pubescent girl, have anything to do with a revolutionary Iran in the grip of the Ayatollah Khomeini? How about that the all-controlling Humbert represented the totalitarian government of Iran, and the hapless Loita the ordinary Iranian people? And what about The Great Gatsby, that appeared to glorify the rich, the class against which the government’s and people’s ire was directed? Well, through discussing and arguing about Gatsby and what it means, the five young women were able to see that the rich in The Great Gatsby were a selfish and duplicitous bunch, and so were portrayed in anything but a favourable light.
“Reading Lolita in Tehran” makes us see that the Iranian revolution was, in fact, a war against women, particularly against their sexuality, which the exclusively male leadership regarded as a threat to men. Therefore women had to be covered up, for, their showing too much flesh got males all aquiver, sapping their moral fibre. One young woman was even hauled in by the police for eating an apple too seductively.
“Reading Lolita in Tehran”, apart from giving us a graphic portrayal of what life in Iran was like for women, is also a paean to the universally redemptive power of literature, and makes us want to haul out our mouldering copies of Lolita and The Great Gatsby and re-read them right now.
A New (Literary) Adventure
Since I’m an old man with little to do, other than read, see films, and declaim to my fellow drinkers in the pub how the world should be, thereby causing them to climb the wall in head-pounding stupefaction, the handful of friends I have left suggested I start up this thing called a blog, the better to write about the books I’ve read, and films I’ve seen. But they advised me to to keep my untutored opinions about the world to myself, so not to frighten off potential aficionados of my epistolary endeavours.
So it shall be.
I will begin with the books I’ve read since January 1st this year, since I can remember them. Films are another story, since no sooner do I see them than they escape my tenuous memory. Well, most. But some do stay in my mind, perhaps for reasons only a psychiatrist would fathom. I’ll talk about these as time allows.
So, as they say on the television, stay tuned.
So it shall be.
I will begin with the books I’ve read since January 1st this year, since I can remember them. Films are another story, since no sooner do I see them than they escape my tenuous memory. Well, most. But some do stay in my mind, perhaps for reasons only a psychiatrist would fathom. I’ll talk about these as time allows.
So, as they say on the television, stay tuned.
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