Waistcoat Buttons & Mutton Pies

Immortal Cocked Hat!

2006-06-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

What joy was mine to see old Eldridge's tottering chariot shudder to a stop beneath the vast umbrella of the old oak on such an eve as that! My dusky tormentors frowned, hissed, shot dagger-eyes at me, and fled, for no Romany can long bear to keep tershins with a Punch & Judy man like Eldridge. Of course, my happiness was tempered, for I knew that they would curse me and that I would have to be watchful: their fury at being thwarted would drive them to desperate and occult deeds.

But soon, as the dusk began to gather about us, I was sharing a flask of rough wine and a hunk of bannock with Eldridge, as his team built up the House of Punch. We swiped away the midges and listened to the plash of the stream, and Eldridge spun wondrous tales of his adventures since he last breathed our balmy airs.

The same old gang was with him: Ned Thodder, bluestubbled and tattooed, did the heavy work, and grunted expletives while he heaved the ropes and hurled the planks and hefted the boards of the House; Janger and Tommo made short work of the more complex tasks of assembly. Mrs Froul, face as ruddy as the sandstone of Horne Edge, hair as yellow as butter, bosom cleaving the evening air like Victory's prow at Trafalgar, tended to the assembly of her dressing-rooms and galley; soon she was among her blackened pots, shrouded with steam and glistening with honest sweat, as she set to to bake the billet-bread and stir the podish and construct the nango soup for which she was renowned. Little Timiny, her short-cropped black hair framing a face as pale as porcelain, silently helped her mistress, performing wondrous and ineffable services as essential as they were unnoticed amid all the clatter and rattle. Westy Nazarene, 7' 8" tall, the 'Highest Punch Man in Christendom', was at his puppets, setting them out as soon as their lean-to (always the first thing to be put up by Thodder & co) was standing, talking to them in his metal-pipe voice, an extraordinary vision in black stovepipe hat and 'devil's-tail' coat; black as night his garb, thin as wire his limbs, like the great puppet himself he seemed to dance on strings and his puppets were more alive than he (such is the great art of the Punch & Judy Prince that he was). Mad Carter and his daughter Jess (a plain and good-hearted wench, always dressed in respected blue) tended the beasts - the Toby Dog, the Serpent, the Egypt Cayman, the Armadillo & the Eohippus; and this year, notwithstanding the Turkish War, they had acquired from a Levantine Captain a herd of Pygmy Aleppo Tortoises, whose ghostly lime-hued faces peered through the fine mesh of their wicker baskets. Ardal Finn and his wife Niamh had come over from Roscommon for the summer season and were unpacking and trying out their instruments after the long journey: the sky was bruising and the old night was falling and through the veins and nets of the ancient trees drifted the intoxicating pulse of the bodrhan, the delicate skirl of the uillean pipes, and the heart-rending soft breeze of Niamh's caressing voice: these were but fragments, as the couple practised amongst the furious activity of the camp, but they meant a world to me, and promised so much on that unforgettable evening.

Ah! Joys to come!

Punch & Judy Saves the Day!

2006-05-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

So, gentlest of readers, there we were, in my garden. I, shivering to get to work with my old sickle, and the Romany wenches at my ankles with all their gallimaufry. Of course, along with the exotic and alarming appearence of the itinerant duo (and the fearsome aspect of their lawless natures and propensities), I was beginning to feel mysteriously enchante and wondering why.

The scents of my burgeoning young garden were all about us. Well, not many, of course, as it is still late Spring. No. What it was, I realised, was the smell of their perfumes. Not knowing what, or how, I saw their eyes and lips and cheeks, all vegetable-dyed in earthen ruddy and blues, and the ravenblack sheen of the hair as fine as show-horses. And then I knew they had their own natural-forest incense about their bodies. The skin of the mother was lined a little about the forehead and the eye-sockets, but she was still handsome in a wild way, and knew it. And her daughter - a lithe girl of around 18 I should guess (or, rather, if a gentleman, perchance I ought not to; but, of course, who is a gentleman inside?) - was coming at it from the other side, being all raw and new and sans experience.

But how could I get rid of them, for they were proffering wares. Clothes-pegs and lucky heather and pine-cone hedgehogs and wigwams made from hay and painted eggshells and varnished river-stones. And the elder woman spoke:

'A pretty scent for Sir's special one?' Lifting up some kind of home-made nosegay or pot-pourri in a tiny leather bag.

'Ah, but Sir has no special one, I'm afraid' I sighed, smiling at the trinket.

'Then we ha' just the things to set Sir aright. My child, here, she 'as jus' the things for 'ee. Jus' the things ter charm the ladies, Sir. Sir'll 'ave a lady in mind, now. I know 'e 'as, now!' And she winked up at me. The daughter's eyes widened and the suggestion of a blush damasked her cheeks as she brushed at her fringe. 'Aar, I can see that Sir 'as a lady as 'e'd love ter charm, now, an' so 'e do!' the older woman pursued it, much to my embarrassment.

'Well, I don't really know about that', I muttered, hot with shame, and the sweat began to bead on my forehead. How ludicrous, I thought. Why did I not take command of the situation, one way or another.

The mother nudged her daughter, who began to show me more ridiculous hand-fashioned items - scraps of things made out of stones and wood. A sinister little carved effigy of a woman, her figure grossly exaggerated, after the African manner; fashioned in a dirty black material, this was thoroughly nauseating to behold. The mother saw my reaction.

'We can see that Sir's impressed wi' th' doll, so 'e be, an' that's as should be, it bein' a Charmed-Figurine n'all, so it be. An' nobbit th' 60 pennies fer it an' all it's power ower th' lady o' Sir's dreamins, Sir. So sharly Sir mus' 'ave it, eh?'

Oh no. How was I to escape from this tender trap? Despairingly I smirked and shifted and sniffed, and was utterly at a loss. Until the blessed sound of a scratchy phonograph playing the Giant Roistering Orchestra crumhorn version of 'Jump For Me, Jiminy!' came through the air that was heavy and blurred with the calls of the stock-doves, and there it teetered, for all the world like an old wobbly world of canvas and wierd painted screenery. Eldred's Punch & Judy House, and arriving at my front gate in the nick of time!

Saved by old Eldred! Now I could escape these infernal painted gypsy women!

A Vision of Raw Life

2006-05-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

These Gypsies that have established such an encampment upon the erstwhile pure sward of the Telsey's banks near Quivery Bridge (and they continue to arrive; just now, this evening, two more caravans have shambled past my gate and they have joined the milling throng, the madding horde of these Romany folk; fat men in tight shirts water and run their rough sleek ponies; dark-faced fierce women - their visages as fearsome as my black fire-grate - gut hares and bake hedgehogs and squat beneath the vans; their nubile daughters shuffle around or flounce in sullen sulky gyres, as if knowingly trapped, as if aware that time and the life in which they are embedded will destroy their shocking beauty and mould their graceful forms into the hunkering hulks of their mothers' images; shrieking children torment ragged dogs) have shown me a compelling filthy vision of real raw life, framed in the elegant parameters of my West Window.

Amos Bounty's wheelbarrow (as I have said, this is disused, for it is stoved in the rear - a sow with toothache chewed it through in '36, a sow named 'Puggy' who had her throat hacked open for her pains the following day by Dick Dackery from Lugg's Tump Farm; how she screamed as she was hoisted into the cloudless sky) lay abandoned among the buttercups, for old Amos had fled up to Timblett's Mead, to crop the nettles for his soup that he loves to sip in Spring-tide. I was alone and just about to start on clearing out the old duck-sheds. I was at the shed door with my sickle in my right hand when detected a wheezing breath behind me.

It was one of the gypsy crones, right behind me, with a gorgeous young girl by her side, who I assumed would be her daughter. Dressed in gaudy rags, sultry as two Spanish maidens in their dirt, they stood and stared into my eyes, bearing their baskets of trinkets and spells.

But soft, gentle Reader, for the milk will o'er-boil on my stove. I must attend to my night-cap and leave you for now. There shall be more of this anon!

'Beware of the spud-toad lest you squash him flat' as old John Doolap used to say!

The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies Oh!

2006-05-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

I lay in my bed the other Wednesday night, or was it on it? No, I mean yes, it was in it, if by 'in it' we mean on the mattress (which itself is on the bedframe and springs) and between the sheets (which among them are both under and over me, as it were). My walls are light blue and mauve, the better to encourage the pensive faculty and to further meditation. I was in the room (if by 'in' we mean above the floor, beneath the ceiling and in position to be surrounded by the walls, which in the case of my irregular room number some half-dozen; of the windows and the door I deliberately make no mention; indeed, it is as if there were none of these, to go purely on what I make explicit, though I assume that you, gentle reader, are judging that I only explicate that which needs it and that you take for granted the presence of door and windows - ouch! no, I don't, I have now made these explicit!) of course, as the bed is in the room and I was in the bed. The room was in the house and so I was in the house which, being in England, so was I. England being in the 'earth', then I was too. And so forth, &c.

Amos Bounty was under his wheelbarrow, for which I pitied him, for it was a wild and damp night. I had done him the courtesy of providing an old horse-blanket that my great-great grandfather, William Erray, late of the 32nd West Dorset Light Horse, had stolen from an Afghan wheelwright and left in the family. This he had draped over the upturned wheelbarrow, as if it were some crazy-proportioned and keeled yurt, and he sat beneath it, peering out into the gloom of the misty gloaming that was gathering and dissolving the valley. Great clouds of steam escaped as he breathed. He breathed like an old stallion, and the horse-blanket became his dimly-glimpsed mien as he hunkered there, I thought. It suited him. He was the very image of an old and wheezing cart-horse in my garden in the rain and the deepening blue darkness. I returned to my escritoire, and my epistolary task (for I was composing an account of my week which I intended to send my Aunt Groocock-Slyne; I send her just such an account - it is of the same week, I merely change its content as if she benefits from a fresh version of the same week every quarter, for that is when I send her the new account of the same week, each quarter, I mean; I suppose I could vouchsafe her a fresh account of the same quarter every week, but a weekly effort seems beyond me at present, unless I can grow me an extra pair of arms or two, and then I should resemble nothing quite so much as an epistolary octopus or insect, and should get nothing else done but writing letters to Aunt Groocock-Slyne, and who would furnish the old cart-horse, sorry, Amos Bounty, with his horse-blankets in the gathered gloam? - certainly not me, for I should be a frantically-scribbling many-armed creature shackled to his groaning escritoire of an evening, of an evening, of an evening. Another thing - were I to attempt to supply my Aunt with a fresh account of the same quarter each week, I would face the thorny issue (Hawthorn-Fanciers Weekly, now that's a thorny issue; another would be the milk that comes out of a cow called Rose, perhaps!), I would face the difficult problem, of having to try to condense a whole quarter into a week. Now this should not be beyond me, but it would sorely try me, I fear, for at present my energies are sapped (back to the thorny issue!) by the gypsies, who have set up their camps on the river bank. (Now, condensing an issue - there's a fine can of condensed milk, if ever there were one!)

Now as to exactly how these Romany have tasked and are tasking me, well, I shall tell you the next time we meet.

Until then, take good care, and boil no dock-leaves before mistletide, as my late neighbour, Nana Nuncley used to counsel.

Mock Turtle Musings!

2006-05-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

And, yes, I did so enjoy my tin of Mock Duck. I ate it with asparagus parcels and an apostle spoon (and my mouth and other bodily features). I bought it furtively, carried it home, and ate it with relish. No, I tell you a lie, I possess no relish. Olives, yes, I have these. I consumed no olives along with the lovely Mock Duck, however. I ate it with asparagus parcels and an apostle spoon. This is the talk I had with my friend, Amos Bounty, who lives in a disused wheelbarrow in my garden, at the time of my remarkable meal:

'Have yer 'ad yon Mock Duck yit which is in the tin yer fetched frae toon yusterdah, eh?' he queried.

'Why yes, Amos, old fruit, I certainly have "had it" good and proper. I mean, I have eaten it all up, you know', I replied, scratching my left ear with a wishbone I keep for just such an exigency.

'Oh, ar'. He stroked his chins. 'Oh, ar. An' whit did yer 'av wi' it, then, eh?'

'Oh, asparagus parcels, dear heart, asparagus parcels indeed.'

Blinking and pursing and blowing out his filthy veined cheeks. 'Hur, yus, then, yer'll 'av etten 'em up wi' esperrigus, then, werry nice an' all!'

(He'd walked into this one!) 'Oh no, Amos, I ate it with a spoon!' And I raised a triumphant finger. Victory was mine!

Oh the joys of intelligent debate!