Creative Writers Group - Dave Wellings

This is my 'Tooth Fairy' assignment - 500 words.

2010-11-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

A SPECIAL CASE
The Mafia used violin cases to disguise their sub-machine guns. I used a violin case to disguise my boxing kit.
“Orchestra rehearsal tonight!” I would call cheerfully as I left the house – and that would be enough to deter Dad. He’d attended one of our school concerts – once – and swore never again.
“I’m surprised the RSPCA didn’t turn up,” he’d said. “It sounded as though you were torturing small furry animals.” He’d snored through Hayden’s ‘Surprise’ Symphony until the crashing chord that gives the piece its name had caused him to fall off his seat. So my violin case was like a crucifix and garlic to a vampire.
If he’d known I was boxing for the school, he would have been there at ringside, offering unsolicited advice – and criticism. Some boys welcomed family support, they said it gave them a lift. I dreaded it; every slip, every punch I walked into would be noted and faithfully repeated in detail to visiting relatives for weeks to come. Perhaps he was genuinely concerned or merely amused, either way I found it excruciating so I kept him away – with the violin case.
Football wasn’t a problem; inter-school matches were played on mid-week afternoons when Dad was at work. And he had no interest in my evening badminton matches and yet ironically, it was badminton that caused the problem. I played in the school ‘doubles’ team and was a notorious ‘poacher’, diving around the court and stealing shots I should have left to my partner. To my mother’s consternation, I would arrive home with stitches over my eyebrow or a plaster over my nose after getting in the way of my partner’s backswing.
“Have you been boxing again?” she would ask anxiously.
One night, after tasting my partner’s racquet, I went home with a fat lip and a loose tooth. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time because I was scheduled to box at Walsall Town Hall the next night. This was before the days of mouth guards and head guards so I prepared to say goodbye to my loose tooth.
Amateur boxing at schoolboy level would not normally interest the local newspaper so there was little chance of my father or anyone else reading about it. The Walsall Observer, however, thought this tournament was a special case and had sent both reporter and photographer to follow the progress of one David Astley who the previous year had reached the All-England Finals at Wembley. This year Astley was hotly tipped to become All-England champion. Tournament matches were made by drawing names out of a hat, rather like the barrier draw for the Melbourne Cup: I had drawn Astley.
I lost the bout of course – and the tooth. There was no point in telling my folks I’d lost the tooth at orchestra rehearsal, walking into a trombone slide perhaps or the prodding bow of a double bass, so I just mumbled something about my careless badminton partner and went to bed.
Nothing was said over the weekend about the missing tooth but when I awoke on Monday morning, I found a newspaper clipping on my pillow. The fight had made headline news on the sports page, or rather, Astley had made headline news. I’d just been the fall guy, literally.
I went downstairs and saw Dad reading at the kitchen table.
“Who left this?” I asked sheepishly.
Dad just shrugged. “It must have been the tooth fairy,” he muttered and went on reading the remains of The Walsall Observer.
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2010-07-22T01:09:00.000-07:00

This was a Writers' Group assignment about'FRIENDLY FIRE'. It was published in the Soapbox column of 'The Australian' newspaper on 16th of July, 2010.

There are casualties in every war and the most heart-breaking can be those caused to soldiers by their own side. This is usually referred to as ‘friendly fire’, one of those oxymorons beloved by the military, like military intelligence, military justice and military music.
Self-inflicted harm is not always physical; reputations can also suffer from well-intentioned but misguided actions.
I first visited Australia in 1980 with a Zimbabwean boxer defending his Commonwealth Championship. The promotion in Melbourne was well organized; we were met at the airport, taken to a comfortable hotel, introduced to the media and generally feted. Everything was professionally presented until the main bout was about to begin and patrons stood for the national anthem. A nightclub singer in a tuxedo and frilly-fronted shirt took the microphone and crooned ‘Australia Fair’ in a pseudo-American accent. I looked around the stadium expecting the police to drag him away! In Africa a national anthem is a moment of dignity. I’d heard that Australians were laid back and irreverent but taking the mickey out of the national anthem was surely going too far.
Some years later I attended the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix in Adelaide and, before the race began, the crowd of 100,000 was asked to be upstanding for the national anthem. A skimpily dressed young woman mounted the dais and began to warble ‘Australia Fair’ like a gospel singer from the Deep South. The deep south of America, that is, not deep South Australia.
And isn’t it self-defeating to sing Australian country music in a foreign accent? When a recent Australian of the Year was a country music singer he crooned like a Yank – yet when he spoke he sounded like a normal Aussie bloke from the bush. Would it be too much of a strain to sing ‘Strine?
Personally, I can do without chest-thumping nationalism; Samuel Johnson was right when he said “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. If it is deemed necessary to sing the anthem at international events then let’s afford it some dignity.
The latest affront was at the World Cup in Johannesburg when a football team lined up for the anthem before the kick-off. To a man they stood with their hands over their hearts like Good Ol’ Boy Americans. This was the Socceroos. Perhaps there is a case for bringing back National Service, just to teach young men how to stand to attention. If the soccermorons are so anxious to be accepted as Americans, they should do what thousands of others do – walk to the Mexican border and crawl under the fence.

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Assignment: 500 words using the following - grateful, tunneling, golliwog, vice, aubergine, wichetygrub, meditate, paper.

2009-09-09T03:22:00.000-07:00

FRISSON CHIPS

Inspector Tubbs moved silently through the shadows cast by the flickering torches. He was grateful for the low cloud obscuring the early-rising moon as he moved closer to the open french doors. He was now close enough to see candlelight glistening on the silverware although it offered barely enough light for the diners to read the menu. Were they going to eat – or meditate?
“The suckers forgot to bring a torch,” Tubbs chuckled to himself then whispering into his sleeve he asked “Everyone in position?”
Disembodied voices in his earphones confirmed their readiness. “Stand by,” he muttered and he sniffed the air like a hunting dog, a final instinctive check. Garlic and cumin.
“Go, go, go!” he snapped into his sleeve and he sprinted the 20 metres to the nearest window.
“Stay where you are!” he ordered a middle-aged man with silly stubble on his chin, “And put down that knife.”
On the far side of the room Sgt Slim burst through the kitchen door but stopped to scrape something from the sole of his shoe (it was mashed potato drizzled with truffle oil). DC Stodge swung into the room like an Israeli commando on one of the drapes and crouched ready for action. After blackening his face and tunneling through the nearby shrubbery he looked more like a golliwog. Somewhere a wine glass shattered as it fell to the floor and a woman screamed. Pony-tailed waiters moved forward but Inspector Tubbs stopped them with a glare.
“Nobody leaves!” he commanded. There would be no hope of finding all those black-clad waiters in the dark. A man wearing a white tuxedo over a black round-necked sweater minced around the tables and confronted the intruder.
“I’m the Maitre D’, what’s going on?”
Tubbs took from his pocket a sheet of paper. “I have here a warrant to search the premises,” he said and thrust it into the man’s hand.
“The Vice Squad?” The Maitre D’ raised his eyebrows and glanced around at some likely suspects.
“No,” Tubbs corrected, “The Pretentious Food Squad,” and he produced a small digital camera. “Just look at this, sergeant,” he said indicating a huge square white plate. In the centre of it a neat pile of food teetered amid a puddle of ‘jus’. He leaned across the table to take a snap then turned to the next culinary creation.
“Roast aubergine stuffed with witchety grub au gratin: you’re not going to eat that, are you Madame?”
He took another snap as evidence but had to consult the menu to identify the twee construction masquerading as a meal. “Foie gras with toasted marshmallow, tamari-soaked powdered almonds and limoncello curd. And look at the price of it, sergeant. Who would –?”
Unfortunately, the sergeant had already seen the price and fainted, taking down with him a small but expensive serving of fried ginger chips with green onion and ponzu dressing…

____________________

Dave

August assignment: Earliest Memories

2009-09-09T00:28:00.000-07:00

THE BLACK-OUT CURTAIN

Our earliest memories are usually a collage of images, rather than a coherent narrative. Scenes saved on our personal hard-drive for so many years, surviving the ‘brown-outs’ and ‘crashes’ of an over-crowded and sometimes alcohol abused brain, imply a potent trigger for their initial capture.
A World War II black-out curtain features in my earliest memories. All homes in Great Britain were required to have them to deny assistance to German bombers at night. As a two year old I would invariably be in bed by the time the ‘black-out’ was installed so the only time I would be aware of the heavy black curtains would be during dangerously close bombing raids. My older sister and I would be wrapped in blankets, carried downstairs and placed on a mattress in a Morrison Shelter for safety. I came to associate those curtains with trouble.
No amount of soothing assurances from caring parents could fool a two-year-old snatched from sleep. If there was nothing to worry about, why had I been plucked from a warm bed? Why the frantic huddle down the stairway – and why was I imprisoned in a steel cage?
The Morrison Shelter was a crush-proof structure which doubled as a table. Covered with a dainty table cloth, it was barely noticeable, just another place for us kids to play or hide in during the day but a place of refuge on bad nights.
The night I remember most clearly, perversely, was a night of confusion. Thunderstorms which had been brewing all day, broke overhead as the air raid sirens began their nightly wail. Soon the sonic boom of lightning strike was competing with the thump of exploding bombs. The black-out curtain which prevented light from leaking out also blocked the flashes of lightning sneaking in, leaving only the terrifying sounds to distinguish the source of attack. A direct hit by a bomb in the neighbourhood was invariably followed by the sound of shattering glass and the clatter of slates cascading off a roof. Lightning strikes merely left thunder to bounce off the low lying clouds.
Cowering in our shelter, I discovered a method of distinguishing one agent of death from another: the black-out curtain billowed slightly from the blast of a nearby bomb. Lightning, no matter how close it sounded, merely made it shake for a second.
Fear, like a bossy sister, was relative.

_____________________

MISSED CONNECTIONS

2009-05-24T00:10:00.000-07:00

Our May assignment called for a short piece on 'The Whistle Stop'

MISSED CONNECTIONS

It was hard to distinguish the beige from the brown
And I barely acknowledged the sepia plain.
With endless parched paddocks and no sight of a town
The landscape absorbed our scurrying train.

Whistle-stop stations occasionally slipped by
Like the punctuation marks spacing a page:
Platforms, place names, water tanks now dry,
The sole bleached reminders of a more prosperous age.

I had travelled this line four decades earlier
As a young man about to begin a career.
I was on my way back, balding and burlier
And smiling at the hopes of that innocent year.

I remembered the smile on a young girl’s face
At an unremarkable whistle-stop station.
Our eyes met in a gentle, mental embrace
As we shared the moment’s elation.

A discreet wave from both as the train pulled away,
Too soon the connection was broken
Yet the potential for love was there that day
Without a word being spoken.

So life has gone by and forty years down the track
I reflect on mistakes and misplaced affections.
There is time to regret, as the train trundles back,
What is lost through life’s missed connections.

______________

Perception is Reality

2008-07-03T01:37:00.000-07:00

A FINE ART

The multi-billion dollar cosmetics industry relies on the myth that perception is reality. If a woman of advancing years chooses to spend enough money and time, she can create the perception that she is half her age. The majority of high-performance sportscars are sold to over-weight, balding, middle-aged men who, for the price of an average house, can drive around creating the perception of youth and virility – right up to the moment they remove the sad but necessary baseball cap, climb with difficulty from the low-slung machine and reveal a belly overhanging the ill-advised jeans. All these illusions rely on omission of the indefinite article.
There is a classic sketch by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in which Dud announces he is to perform a song specially written for him by Cole Porter. There is clearly room for doubt as the song turns out to be no more than a comic ditty. Pete then explains that the song was written for them by a coal porter, not the Cole Porter…
So perception is a reality. Post-modernists can tie themselves in knots defining the reality but my friend Quentin had no qualms about such things – he always chose the reality with the highest profit margin. He boasted, with some justification and several probationary orders, that he could see financial opportunities where others saw only obstacles. A case in point was the artist painting portraits in K-Mart Plaza.: shoppers drifted by with no more than an admiring glance. A brave punter sat self-consciously having her portrait painted by the elderly artist while around them, displayed on easels were completed works. Most were of anonymous customers but some were of familiar ‘celebrities’ and there was even one of the Mona Lisa.
“Look at that!” Quentin gasped, “It’s the Mona Lisa.”
“It’s a Mona Lisa,” I corrected, “not the Mona Lisa.”
“But it’s such a good likeness, who would know it wasn’t the real thing?”
“Well, the fact that it’s being sold in K-Mart Plaza for 140 bucks offers a clue…”
Quentin was immune to sarcasm and before I could say Michelangelo Caravaggio, he was interrogating the bemused artist. Perhaps it was Quentin’s plummy accent or maybe it was the Cambridge tie (bought at an Op Shop) but the artist took him seriously and patiently explained how even the most accomplished copy can be distinguished from the original. Oils, canvas and varnish have all changed over the years, even the wooden frame on which the canvas was stretched can be carbon-dated to verify its true age. To illustrate the importance of brush strokes and technique, he produced from his case two more copies – ‘Girl with a Pearl Ear-ring’ by Vermeer and Frans Hals’ ‘Laughing Cavalier’.
Quentin was impressed. “That’s amazing, they look so authentic. Why would anyone cough up millions when they could buy something identical?”
“A photograph would be identical,” the artist gently explained, “but it wouldn’t be an original.”
“I can’t decide which one to buy,” Quentin muttered, peering from one work to the other. I suggested he buy the smallest. I didn’t humiliate him by mentioning that he was currently living in a borrowed campervan and the walls of a Volkswagen Kombi were not conducive to a large canvas. “You’re right,” he conceded, “I’ll take the Vermeer. Lend me a hundred and forty, will you?”
As we sat drinking coffee in the mall, I saw the dollar signs blinking in Quentin’s eyes and I realized he was going to try and pass off the painting as an original.
“You won’t get away with it,” I said.
“I know where I can buy an old picture frame for a few bob – and I can doctor the canvas.”
“And where will you find a mug to buy this masterpiece?”
Quentin sighed at my naiveté. “There are people with embarrassing amounts of cash which the Australian Tax Office will never hear about. Their challenge is in converting it into tangible assets and greed can vitiate their judgment; I happen to know such a person.”
To say that I was sceptical would be an understatement yet when I met up with him a few weeks later he was ecstatic. “The deal’s done!” he crowed. “I asked for a hundred grand and he offered fifty; I said, make it fifty grand US, cash – and he agreed.”
“And you actually have the money?”
“It’s all here,” he said shaking the briefcase which usually contained sausage rolls and petite sandwiches he liberated from annual general meetings and book launches slipped into uninvited. “I’m about to deposit some of it into my bank account.” He was so excited he almost offered to pay back the loan.
The euphoria didn’t last long, by the next day he was looking decidedly gloomy. The bank had taken the $5,000 he had offered but declined to credit his account as an ultra-violet light test had revealed certain anomalies: the bank notes were forgeries. He’d been invited to explain how the illicit notes had come into his possession and he would probably be interviewed by the police.
“There’s another 45,000 dollars US,” he groaned. “US for useless.” We were walking through K-Mart Plaza again, the artist had gone and an Asian woman was selling socks. You have to be down at heel to be interested in socks.
“If it’s any consolation,” I said “some of the most famous works in the most prestigious galleries are known to be fakes yet people still queue up to see them. Maybe you should leave your money on display, just to impress, as if it was a work of art. After all, it’s the perception that matters.”
Quentin looked at me and shook his head in dismay. “Sometimes,” he said, “I feel you have only a slippery grasp on reality.”

_______________________

Dave.

APOLOGY

2008-03-12T03:02:00.000-07:00

During recent excavations in Berlin, this charred note was found among the rubble. It was addressed to no one in particular but was signed A.H.

We all make mistakes, even your beloved Fuhrer. To share with you my dream of a wonderful future for the Fatherland and then let it turn into a nightmare was unforgivable and I am truly sorry. So many of our devoted Jugend have been sacrificed for the dream and I now ask myself: was it justified? Was a united Europe a worthy goal? Well, Mein Kinder, my answer is yes!
Without our firm hand and strong leadership it will take decades for the European family to come together; the neurotic French, the dull Belgians, the eccentric English, the plodding Dutch, how they will drag their feet! How they will all demand the right to favouritism, like spoiled little children! We could have created the greatest economic bloc the world had ever known; the Reich mark would have been the common currency throughout a common market using a common language, the language of Schiller, the language of Nietzsche. And the trains would have run on time!
Imagine a Chancellor of Europe who is an animal lover, a vegetarian and an artist. We are the first nation to promote an anti-smoking campaign to preserve the health of our youth. The cigar-puffing Churchill also claims to be an artist. I have seen some of his insipid water-colours, I could have given him tips on tonal values, who knows, we might have become friends. If it were not for Churchill’s tricks the Americans would never have become involved; they have no stomach for war and left alone they will become fat and impotent. It was a mistake to bomb the British, they are so easily provoked – look what they did to my Luftwaffe!
The Russians should also have been left to their own fate: Stalin was killing his own people faster than our most advanced Panzer divisions. There have been other mistakes for which I am truly sorry, like the Final Solution. The logistics were first class but the PR work has been very sloppy.
I must close now as I hear the Russians closing in (how long do they think Communism will last?) but just time to pass on the advice of Herr Doktor Freud: “Keep taking the tablets.”
A.H.
____________________

Dave

January Assignment: "A Blank Room, A Window and a Chair..."

2008-01-28T03:08:00.000-08:00

I’M NOT THERE

I sat back in my comfortable leather chair and waited for my visitor to begin. I’d invited him to sit down but he’d given me a troubled look and said he preferred to stand. Now he was hovering over me awkwardly while I enjoyed the craftsmanship of hand-made British leather. I had commissioned the suite of leather chairs to match those of my London club; I saw no reason to explain this to my visitor who I suspected had no appreciation for the finer things in life. He was looking down, shuffling his feet uneasily, unsure of how to begin.
“It is a Persian carpet, in case you were wondering,” I said, to break the ice and put him at ease. “But it’s only the traditional design which is Persian; it was actually made in Turkey. The quality is determined by the number of knots per square inch: the denser, the better. The carpet craftsmen invariably go blind –”
“Could we discuss more mundane matters?” he said, interrupting and confirming my fears about his tastes.
I shrugged and decided not to offer him a drink: my 30 year old fino sherry would have been wasted on him and he would probably have been nervous handling the irreplaceable crystal-ware. “The sooner we get it over with, the better,” I said.
“Quite so, Sir. Where were you between the hours of nine and eleven yesterday evening?”
“I was here, practising - Chopin nocturnes and etudes, some of the less challenging pieces of Debussy. You could be forgiven for thinking that magnificent piano over there was imported but it was made here in Australia, from Tasmanian old forest timbers – such a wonderful tone –”
“Can anyone verify that, Sir?”
“The tone?”
“The time you were playing – the piano.”
“My neighbour might have heard: she has been known to complain.” I turned away to show what I thought of philistines; I seemed to be surrounded by them. I studied one of my favourite Vermeer portraits on the wall, enjoying how the light from my window revealed the Dutch Masters’ use of sunlight for their own effect to intensify the yellows and subdue the blues.
“I’m afraid your neighbour won’t be able to help us, Sir. My colleagues were prepared to charge you with her murder but, under the circumstances, I shall be making an alternative recommendation.”
“I should think so too,” I said, still admiring the Vermeer.
“You see, Sir, there’s nothing here except a blank room, a window and a chair…”

_________________

Dave
422 words

ECHO BRAVO

2007-06-09T22:31:00.000-07:00

ECHO BRAVO

Eddy Budd is a substantial man in every sense. There is nothing ghostly about him; he doesn’t even believe in ghosts, or rather, he didn’t.
He is an accomplished artist; he studied art in London and has regularly submitted paintings to our local ‘Celebration of Art’ competition. One of the criteria of that competition calls for a local theme and Eddy hit on the idea of depicting our small town’s War Memorial. Nothing relates to its locality as poignantly as a war memorial: familiar family names – the names of sons, brothers and husbands – are chiselled into the stone.
Rather than feature the cenotaph in a naturalistic landscape, he painted the entire picture in shades of orange. The sandstone memorial is seen rising through orange mist beneath heavy orange clouds. It was an original and bold concept but, facing the typical artist’s quandary of satisfaction and self-doubt, he asked the opinion of a friend who was visiting the area. The friend studied the painting for a moment and then said he liked the idea of the faces barely visible through the orange smoke of battle. Eddy blinked. He hadn’t painted any faces. The friend took out his pen to carefully indicate the features of a face – the eyes, the nose, the mouth. Not on one face but five.
Eddy was aware of the Rorschach Test in which an ink blot spreading across a page can be interpreted as different things depending on the viewer. We see what we want to see. With this in mind, he showed his painting to a local member of the RSL, a veteran of the Second World War. Could he see five faces through the smoke?
Not-so-young eyes take longer to focus; spectacles have to be polished but, yes the faces were there alright – and the tailplane of a World War Two bomber, dropping through the orange clouds. Eddy blinked again. He hadn’t painted a tailplane of any aircraft – ever.
A resident of the Nirvana Hostel was the last person to pass judgement. She was in her eighties, frail now and confined to a wheelchair but she didn’t hesitate to commend the artist. “It’s such a good likeness, this one here, it’s William my younger brother. He was in Echo Bravo, a Lancaster bomber. They were shot down over Germany in 1944, all five crewmen were lost.”
Eddy put the painting away, stored it somewhere at the back of his studio and to this day it hasn’t been shown in public.

__________________

MAILBOX BLUES

2007-03-31T01:17:00.000-07:00

Our March assignment called for a short piece on the proliferation of old micro-wave ovens recycled as letter boxes.

MAILBOX BLUES

It’s mounted on the white picket fence,
Now no more than a token
Of an empty marriage that didn’t make sense:
Both were terminally broken.

I worked all hours to keep us afloat
And even attempted to save,
Only to return to a re-cycled note –
“Your dinner’s in the micro-wave.”

You would be out somewhere, (dancing on tombs,
Attending a witches’ coven?)
While I’d come home to the cold, empty rooms
And peer into the micro-wave oven.

I didn’t mind the odd Lean Cuisine
Or the frozen casseroled mutton,
If only you’d occasionally been on the scene,
Equipped with your own de-frost button.

The kids are grown up and live on their own
But your influence fatally lingers:
They can’t get a meal without using a phone.
They still think fishes have fingers!

It seemed only right when you took your leave
And the micro-wave gave up the ghost
To use the oven again to receive
The divorce papers coming by post.

_______________

THE EGG MAN COMETH by Dave Wellings

2007-03-17T03:09:00.000-07:00

The downstairs doorbell kept ringing. I was alone in the flat, taking a shower but above the hiss of the water and the drumming of rain, the doorbell persisted. My instinct was to ignore it. There are few greater pleasures than a hot shower after retreating from a wet day in London. There was a real possibility of the persistent bell pusher being a pedlar of double-glazing or religion but there was also an outside chance that my flat-mate had forgotten his key. It also occurred to me that Tony might have invited his latest girlfriend over and had then simply forgotten. This had already happened during the two weeks I had lived there although this would presumably be a replacement girlfriend. Reluctantly I turned off the shower, wrapped a towel around my waist and bounced bare-footed down the stairs to the entrance hall. The large Edwardian house had been converted into flats but the tiled hall and stained glass door had been retained. Profiled against the glass was a short, squat figure in a bowler hat. Not a new girlfriend then. Tony’s girlfriends tended to be tall, leggy and glamorous – inexplicably as Tony was none of these things. The bell continued to ring until the moment I swung the door open and confronted the intruder. For a moment, we stared at each other and then he said “Touché.”

I assumed he was referring to us both dripping water, it couldn’t have been to our appearance as I was half naked and tanned from Australia while he was adequately clothed for an English spring. He wore a black rubberised raincoat that reached down to his ankles, the sort of utility coat that had gone out of use in the 1950s but now seemed tailor-made for the day, if not for him. He also wore a black bowler hat, the brim of which was quickly filling with water from our leaking gutter.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Sean O’Connery lives here? I have it on some authority. Some authority!” He spoke through clamped jaws and almost shouted the last word.

I began to laugh. Some of Tony’s friends were drama students who would remain ‘in character’ for an assignment. Some had remained drama students for many years and, like Tony, were in their mid-twenties but the man in the bowler hat could have been in his mid-fifties, which would have been stretching it, even by their elastic standards. I realised the man was serious.

“Are you sure you have the right address?”

His response was to slide a manila folder from inside his raincoat but as he looked down to read from it, the moat of water around his hat cascaded over the brim and onto the folder. An expletive would have been justified. It would have been compulsory in Australia but the man merely waited for the water to drain off and then, through barely moving lips, intoned “Sean O’Connery, 184 Colney Hatch Lane, North 10. This is one-eighty-four? One Eight Four!”

“Yes but there’s no Sean here.”

It was a joke among the flat-dwellers that the three Australians on the ground floor were all named Bruce. In the early ‘seventies, half the Australians in London seemed to be named Bruce. On the upper floor there were three Davids, two Englishmen and me. and then there was Tony in the tiny attic. Tony shared our bathroom and kitchen and, whether we liked it or not, often shared our food. So far, he had not offered to share his girlfriends. I didn’t share any of this with the man in the bowler hat but he waited under the waterfall, willing me to change my mind. To get rid of him and to get out of the draughty doorway, I suggested that he leave a business card. He produced a printed card from inside the all-concealing raincoat and then with a final spillage from the nodded bowler, he turned and splashed his way back down the path.

I had forgotten the incident until much later that day. It was almost midnight when I heard Tony come bounding up the stairs. Long hair was in vogue and he shook the rain from his locks like a dog. He checked the effect of this in the small mirror by the kitchen door, and then he examined his teeth with an exaggerated smile. Tony rarely went anywhere without a toothbrush in his shirt pocket - our smile, he maintained, is our calling card. I took away his smile with the calling card from our visitor. It took away his colour too.

“What did you tell him?” he demanded, crumpling the card in his fist.

“I told him there was no one here named Sean.”

“Nothing else?”

“There was nothing else to tell.”

“Damn! Damn!” he muttered, “He’s found me again.”

“But it was just a bloke asking for Sean Somebody.”

“It wasn’t just some bloke,” Tony groaned, “It was the Egg Man.”

We were sitting on the edge of Tony’s bed – a king-size which almost filled the attic. By the window below the sloping roof there was a half-completed water colour on an easel and in one corner, an old electric oven with the door flung wide open to provide the only form of heating. Tony had dragged me up to his room, carefully closed the door and then begun to explain the enormity of his situation.

His inchoate motor racing career had been funded by various nefarious schemes. He had paid for a term at the International Racing Drivers School by buying old bangers, applying minimal cosmetic improvements and then selling them through the Evening News classifieds. His rationale was simple: buyers would assume a cheap car was an old banger so he charged a bomb. This worked in principle - if principle could ever be considered near Tony - but the profits were undermined by traffic fines. On one occasion when he was collecting an old Triumph Herald, the suspicions of a police patrol were raised by Tony wearing a thick woollen muffler around his face - on a very hot afternoon. The muffler had been necessary to mask the engine smoke billowing up from the hole in the floorboards. As the de-merit points on his driving licence began to mount, Tony addressed the problem: he acquired licences in other names. Before the days of centralised, computerised licensing authorities, it was possible to book a driving test at any one of the many testing centres around London, then, having passed the test, have a licence issued in whatever name was given – Peter O‘Toole, Michael O’Caine, Sean O’Connery, whomever. It was a short-term solution, of course, and to finance a competitive racing car he needed to think bigger.

The way to make money, he explained as he hung his socks over the oven door to dry, was to control the supply and demand of a product that everyone used - like beds. With untypical modesty, he decided that the London bed market might be beyond his scope so he moved back to his home town of Plymouth and attempted to corner the bed market there. He snapped up beds at auctions, at garage sales, he bought beds advertised in the newspaper and some that weren’t even for sale. He stored them in the garage, in the garden shed and in every room of his mother’s house until there was barely room for anyone to sleep. It would have been only a matter of time before he owned every spare bed in the area and could have named his price for them – but time wasn’t on Tony’s side. The bed market had remained stubbornly dormant and Tony had run out of capital.

Like principle, capital wasn’t a word I naturally associated with Tony: how, I asked, did he raise capital?

“How?” he repeated as though I had just arrived from Mars rather than Australia. “The banks are begging people to take out personal loans! I merely obliged them by taking out four.”

It was true that the leading banks were promoting their ‘finance products’ and their required proof of identity was fairly basic – a driver’s licence and any legal document showing a current address, such as a police summons. Tony had ample supplies of each and had no trouble raising the initial capital for his venture. Stock acquisition was pursued aggressively but with most of the money spent and no sign of enhanced bed prices, he was eventually forced to start selling. Flooding the area with second-hand beds would have depressed the market further so a trickle feed was employed to re-coup just enough cash to meet monthly payments to the banks. The slow turn over in beds caused many sleepless nights and the next motor racing season was already approaching. He decided to cut his losses, accept a blanket offer from a dealer and ‘invest’ the last of his money in a final term at the racing drivers’ school.

Graduates were automatically entered for an end-of-term Formula Ford race with considerable kudos and publicity going to the victor. It was an incestuous affair as the school was guaranteed a winner but Tony felt this could be the last chance to launch his motor racing career. Some of his classmates were from wealthy families while others enjoyed commercial sponsorship but those less fortunate saved money by living at the racing circuit in Norfolk. Tony moved in with a group of overseas hopefuls, sharing a World War Two Nissen hut. Two of the young Brazilians were already being mentioned as future Formula 1 drivers so Tony had no illusions about his chances of winning the graduation race. He actually led it for a brief glorious moment but a spin dropped him down the field before he recovered to finish sixth. “Encouraging” was the comment on his end-of-term report but it wasn’t enough: his money was spent, his hopes were dashed and his only assets were a king-size bed and an old van he had used for transporting the beds – appropriately, a Bedford.

Always on the look-out for cheap food, he stopped one day at a farm stall to buy eggs. He remarked on how cheap they were and was told that they were cheap because the farm wasn’t licensed by the Egg Marketing Board. The eggs did not bear the Board’s little ‘lion’ stamp but were fresh and of good quality. People in the city paid twice as much for eggs that were no better. Tony conceded the point and soon came to an arrangement to sell the farmer’s eggs in London.

A nation of shopkeepers had become a nation of mostly foreign shopkeepers with Cypriot, Maltese and Indian families striving to compete with the encroaching supermarkets. Any line that helped them to undercut prices of the major retailers was welcomed and Tony soon sold the unstamped eggs. He returned to Norfolk and this time filled the two tonne capacity of his van by collecting eggs from other unauthorised farms. His delivery round of corner stores grew and so did his profits; within a few months he had paid off his bank loans and made a down payment on a new, larger van. A van which would one day be the transporter for his own racing car - the dream was still alive.

With winter approaching, he moved out of the bleak Nissen hut to share a flat with artistic friends in Hampstead. He began painting watercolours again, something he had enjoyed during a brief period at Art College. His atmospheric paintings captured the action and drama of famous Formula 1 races with colourful reflections from wet tarmac under threatening skies. His life acquired some degree of balance, for after many precarious business ventures, he had finally established a reliable income stream from a legitimate business. Or so he thought.
He had just completed a delivery to one of his regular customers when he was accosted by an odd little man in a bowler hat.

“You supply eggs?” the man asked through clenched teeth. “Eggs!”

“Sure,” said the congenial Tony, “How many trays would you like?”

“I would like you to stop supplying eggs, Sir, that’s what I would like. Your eggs are not stamped with the little lion of the Egg Marketing Board because they do not meet the Board’s requirements. It’s illegal to sell eggs without the Board’s little lion.”

“And they’re not going to take it lion down.” Tony quipped cheerfully.

“It’s not a joking matter, Sir. First offence incurs a fine of five hundred pounds; second offence attracts a fine of one thousand pounds and six months in prison. In prison, Sir!”

It was a bad moment for Tony; he had paid a deposit on one of the revolutionary, wedge-shaped Lotus 61 racing cars. He needed only a few more months of profitable egg sales to raise enough money to take delivery of the ultimate Formula Ford championship challenger. Paying thousand pound fines wasn’t an option, and he didn’t dare ask what a third or fourth offence would cost.

“Can’t we come to some arrangement?” he asked, fingering his recently acquired loot.

“Bribing an inspector of the Egg Marketing Board is a criminal offence. I shall need some details,” the Egg Man said, taking a notebook from his pocket, “Some details!”

At that point, Tony noticed a blue delivery van double-parked while the driver was attending to business in the store. A teenage driver’s mate sat in the passenger seat, reading a comic.

“Wait here, I’ll get my licence,” Tony told the Egg Man and he walked to the blue van and jumped into the driver’s seat.

“Wotcha doin’?” the startled youth cried as the van took off around the corner.

“Just moving it out of the way,” said Tony, guessing correctly that the Egg Man would have noted the registration number. A jog around the block brought Tony back to his own van, parked further down the street – but it had been a close shave.

Further close encounters occurred over the coming months as the Egg Man popped up unexpectedly at cafes and corner stores. Sometimes he would appear from behind a tower of toilet rolls, like a Russian spy – or the bowler hat would rise like a spectral dome above a shelf of cat food, the Egg Man intent on serving a summons. One by one, the retailers were warned off and Tony’s outlets eventually dried up - but not before he had taken delivery of a brand new Lotus.

Finally free to indulge his motor racing ambition, he soon forgot his days as an egg salesman. The Egg Man, however, did not forget. With bulldog tenacity the man traced Tony to his Hampstead address and on one traumatic afternoon actually breached the inner sanctum of his flat. A girlfriend arriving for an assignation had innocently opened the door for the Egg Man and invited him inside. Tony escaped in his underpants through a bathroom window and spent a chilly night in his van, sleeping next to the racing car. In the Lotus position.
A change of address appeared to have shaken off the bowlered harrier – until I had delivered the bad news. I could understand Tony’s dismay.

“I’ll have to leave the country,” he groaned, removing his dried socks from the oven door. “I hear the light in Australia is good for artists…”

I didn’t think he was serious.

I was working as a freelance reporter for motor sport magazines and a serendipitous meeting with Tony at Silverstone had led to me moving into the vacant room below his. It hadn’t taken me long to realise that his temperament was better suited to art than to racing. To my untrained eye, he painted with real talent but he lacked the cool aggression of a racer. He either tried too hard when he was near the lead or became dispirited when he wasn’t. I wasn’t so bold as to tell him this but as a fruitless and expensive season drew to a close, I suspected he had reached the same conclusion.

An unexpected resolution came the next weekend. I was in the kitchen making tea when Tony descended from his attic, breathless and half-naked.

“Got any yoghurt?” he asked, searching the communal fridge, “She’s hungry and she’s a health freak.”

“Take her a carrot,” I suggested.

“Good thinking,” said Tony, missing the irony.

“Shouldn’t you be resting? You’re racing tomorrow.”

“I’m selling the car after tomorrow’s race,” he said, “Some spotty-faced kid with a rich daddy is buying it.” And with that he quickly examined his teeth in the mirror and took the carrot back to his attic, intent on other things.

The race at Brands Hatch was the final round of the Formula Ford Championship. It was fiercely contested by all the leading contenders, so much so that there was a pile-up in the first corner and several cars were eliminated before the race was over. Tony drove conservatively, anxious to preserve his already-committed car so he was surprised to find himself promoted to third place. It was his first – his only – points-scoring position of the year and I was genuinely pleased for him. I was writing my report at the end of the meeting and giving Tony an honourable mention when he rushed into the Press box.

“You’ll have to collect my trophy,” he said, wild-eyed.

“Why me?” I laughed, “This is your big moment.”

“I can’t go; he’s here, waiting for my name to be announced.”

“Who is?” Then I saw the man in the bowler hat, waiting patiently at the foot of the podium.

“Keep the trophy till we meet in Australia,” Tony called out, retreating into the crowd and then with a wave he was gone.

I’ve been back in Australia for many years but I still have that trophy for third place. It’s a tiny thing – I use it as an egg cup.

Dave Wellings © 2007.

ROSE CITY BLUES - A BOOK BY DAVE WELLINGS

2007-03-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

Rose City Blues is a novel by Dave Wellings.

"Ghostwriting the biography of a well-known musician was the break Dean Wesley had been hoping for. Solving an unreported murder might even satisfy his girlfriend's craving for fame. But the mystery he has to solve is not so much who dunnit as did it happen?"

This book and other books written by Dave are available for purchase.

Email cliftonwriters@ausi.com for details.

HAIKU BASED ON "SEA FEVER" by Dave Wellings

2007-03-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

(The following is from a monthly assignment where the writers were given the task to summarise a poem into a Haiku.)

SEA FEVER

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea's face, and a gray dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

John Masefield

HAIKU

Salt deficiency:

Cure for ancient mariner

Rests with buoys and gulls

Dave Wellings © 2006

BRAND NEW STORY by Dave Wellings

2007-03-15T15:31:00.000-07:00

People were queuing to buy my latest book. I could see them through the glass doors; it wasn’t yet 8.30 but there was a queue waiting for my book-signing session. It wasn’t a big queue but there again, this isn’t a big town.

I had sweated over my manuscript for two years – then spent another two years trying to persuade publishers to look at it. Most of them only accept manuscripts through a literary agent - but the agents are just as bad! When one sniffy character suggested I study a writing manual, I blew my stack.

“You wouldn’t recognise a good novel if it fell off a shelf and bounced on your head!” I ranted. “Did you know that a newspaper in Britain submitted a chapter of VS Naipaul’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to all major publishers - and everyone one of them rejected it?”

“Yes, I know,” said the agent.“Well did you know that an Australian newspaper submitted a chapter of Patrick White’s Nobel Prize-winning novel to all the publishers here - and everyone one of them rejected it?”

“Yes, I read that,” said the agent.

“Well one bright spark even suggested that ‘Eye of the Storm’s’ author should study a manual on how to write novels – which is precisely what you advised me. Thank you very much.”

“I was trying to be helpful,” said the agent.

“Helpful? Helpful would be representing struggling authors.”

“Don’t blame me,” said the agent, “blame the GST.”

That pulled me up short in mid-rant.

“What’s the GST got to do with it?”

“Well, all booksellers had to computerise their accounts to handle their GST returns. That made possible an accurate data base of actual sales. Now we know that the best sellers aren’t the literary masterpieces that publishers would have us believe but diet books – or cricketers’ memoirs.”

“What does that have to do with my manuscript?” I asked suspiciously.

“Well, if a famous cricketer brings out a book – it could be about anything, perhaps his favourite food and he calls it say, ‘Bowl o’ Baked Beans’ – as long as it has his name and photo on the cover, it will make a motsa. Now if a publisher took a chance on this novel of yours –”

“‘Rose City Blues’” I prompted.

“Yeah, Rosie Schmooze, whatever and no one’s ever heard of you, it could languish at the back of the shop and end up in the remaindered bin. So they won’t take the chance.”

“But my book should be judged on its merits,” I protested.

“Don’t take it personally, better writers than you have had their egos bruised. Ruth Rendell and Dorothy Lessing were both rejected by their own publishers when they submitted work under pseudonyms. You see, it was the name the publisher needed. Their name is a brand and the brand sells the product.”

A brand? Did he think I was a soap powder? I continued to seethe but eventually conceded the agent’s point: readers trust names they know. A case in point was an author the media had dubbed “Mr Blockbuster”. His first book had been widely acclaimed and sold million of copies; it was later made into a major film. Subsequent books were nowhere near as good but they sold just as many copies as the first because his name had indeed become a brand. His books are still popular although he hasn’t produced anything new for years. Some time ago I discovered why: he’s quite gaga.

After living in New York and London, he had eventually come home and now lives as a recluse on his farm, quite near to here. I thought I’d landed a scoop by arranging an interview with the Great Man but soon realised my mistake. At first he insisted he remembered me although we had never met and then he told me he was expecting a visit from a famous American writer. The man he mentioned had been dead for five years. It explained why Mr Blockbuster never appeared on TV or at writers’ festivals.

That had been two years ago but he was still here, leading a reclusive life with his animals, his farm manager and his housekeeper. He was also still a ‘brand’ name and that was what I needed. Another meeting was arranged – this time he failed to recognise me – but I explained my plan. We could publish my novel with Mr B’s portrait and his name in embossed gold letters on the front cover. Somewhere inside, in very small print, we would reveal that Mr Blockbuster was the franchiser and I, as the author, was the franchisee.

“My old publisher will sue us,” said Mr B in one of his more lucid moments.

“It doesn’t matter if they do,” I explained, “Ian Fleming has been dead for years yet other people have been allowed to write James Bond stories.”

“I met Fleming in the Caribbean –”

“We can cut out the middlemen,” I cut in “and share the profits fifty-fifty.”

“We’ll cut out the publishers!” said Mr B and giggled like a schoolgirl.

Bookstores were warned off by the major publishers but supermarkets were less sensitive: they cared only for the bottom line. One American supermarket chain ordered our book by the tonnage. Mr B’s British publisher issued writs for misrepresentation, fraud and several Latin terms that I didn’t understand. Before I had time to worry, a ‘celebrity lawyer’ offered to defend me pro bono. I understood that.

Early reviews of the book naively proclaimed that Mr Blockbuster was back and writing with renewed vigour but I was soon exposed - condemned as a con-man and damned for duping an ailing icon. I was also praised for ‘pushing the envelope’ and championed for challenging the establishment. I was interviewed, interrogated, photographed and filmed: I barely had time to write.

After twelve months my fame and infamy matched that of any libidinous leg-spin bowler. I wasn’t surprised there was a queue to buy my latest book.

Dave Wellings © 2006

THE MAN IN THE MOON by Dave Wellings

2007-03-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

(A writing assignment where a change of words would have changed history.)

Everyone on board was aware of history being made. The years of planning and preparation had seemingly involved every department in the administration. Input had come from politicians and bureaucrats as well as NASA’s own scientists and technicians. Now that the moment had finally arrived, the three astronauts forced themselves to concentrate on the logistics of landing Apollo’s module on the surface of the moon while somehow storing away their personal awareness. It was impossible to ignore the magnitude of their achievement; every nation on that little blue planet above them was following their progress on live television; every word they uttered was being recorded for posterity. Mounted on the Command Module some way above, a camera showed the successful touch-down of the Lunar Module. A cloud of dust swirled about as the retro-rockets were throttled back. For a moment there was near silence as the small craft settled down on its four pads; for a few seconds all eyes moved away from the instrument data panel and glances were exchanged. They had done it: men had landed on the moon!

Congratulations from Mission Control in Houston crackled through the headsets but the crew was already preparing for the next vital stage. Neil Armstrong was suited up, the pressure-equalisation program was completed and the magnetic door seals released. Buzz Aldrin made one last visual check of Armstrong’s suit before giving him a pat on the shoulder for luck. The ladder was extended and Armstrong began his measured descent, his gravity boots making a re-assuring clunk on each step. On the bottom step he paused to deliver his scripted mission statement.

“One small step for a man: one giant leap for – whoops!”

From the hovering Command Module, Michael Collins saw the top of the astronaut’s helmet sink below the Sea of Tranquillity – a sea of deep dust.

“Neal! Neal!”

“I am kneeling,” yelled Aldrin, “But I can’t see him!”

“Not you - Neal’s gone, he’s sunk – and your module’s sinking! Get out of there; fire your booster rockets now!”

“Mission Control to Apollo, can you repeat your line about one giant leap? PR will need the full quote.”

“Apollo to Houston, we have a problem…”

They never did repeat the mission statement and only two of the crew made the sombre journey back to earth. The United States government lost its enthusiasm for future lunar landings and devoted the entire space program budget to providing free health care to all its citizens. Since that day in July 1969, generations of healthy young Americans have been looking up at the sky on clear nights, knowing that there really is a man in the moon.

Dave Wellings © 2006

YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN by Dave Wellings

2007-03-15T15:24:00.000-07:00

The inaugural meeting of the Clifton Writers Group made a hesitant start.

“Hi, I’m Pam, do you know everyone?”

“Yvonne? Hello, I’m Kate.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m Kate.”

“No, you’re not late, you can have this chair.”

“Where? Near Nobby.”

“No, I’m saying you can sit here.”

“Beer? No thanks Yvonne, it’s a bit early for me, perhaps a cup of tea.”

Maybe those weren’t the actual names; I didn’t catch them at the time, in fact, it soon became apparent that half the people in the room had some kind of hearing impairment. It might explain why we now tend to talk in small groups – we can’t hear people across the room!

Twelve months earlier I had become aware of tinnitus in my left ear, a constant high-pitched whistling sound. The Czech composer Smetana suffered from it and, after identifying the constant note, ended his last string quartet on a long, long E natural. It is common with men of a certain age, especially if they have been exposed to the noise of jet engines, racing cars and gun fire. I’d won the trifecta there. I would often miss telephone calls or my wife calling from another room, (there was some selective deafness of course) but when she pointed out that people from across the railway line were listening to our radio, I had to concede that the volume had been steadily increased over the years. I finally gave in to her urging and agreed to see a doctor.

A succession of doctors had passed through Clifton untroubled by me. I was fit, I had no need of doctors, I merely wanted a referral to a hearing clinic. The doctor had other ideas: he gave me a full roadworthy – blood pressure, blood test, tyres, brakes, wiring, the lot. Eventually he gave me the referral and I made an appointment.

The hearing specialist in Toowoomba told me what I already knew: there was a deterioration of hearing in one ear, an onset of tinnitus and there was little that could be done. Back home there was a message for me to contact the doctor urgently. If there was little that could be done, I didn’t see the need for urgency but I went along anyway.

The blood test had revealed a serious disorder. There were too many of the platelets which cause clotting; there was a risk of a stroke or heart attack. How much risk? Twice the normal level would be bad news; three times was ‘critical’ and four times meant ‘serious imminent risk’. I had five times the normal level. Another referral, another appointment, this time to an oncologist who ordered a bone marrow puncture, CT scans and more blood tests. The diagnosis was thrombocytopenia. Chemotherapy has gradually done its work and the blood tests are encouraging – almost back to normal.

My wife said: “It was lucky you went to the doctor about your hearing.”

Hmm, you can say that again.

Dave Wellings © 2006

KHAN DO by Dave Wellings

2007-03-15T15:22:00.000-07:00

(Note: The following story was the result of a 10 minute writing exercise during our last meeting. The writer was asked to incorporate the following words: Genghis Khan, a yurt, mare's milk and yak stew.)

“What’s that?”

“It’s a yurt. It makes the place look authentic.”

“Right. It takes up a lot of room, doesn’t it? We could fit another dozen tables in there.”

“It’s to create atmosphere.”

“You mean, like the camel dung on the smouldering fire?”

“Exactly.”

“I think you might have overdone the atmosphere bit. Yak stew is stretching the menu and mare’s milk might go unnoticed in the coffee but I think we should get rid of the yurt. Genghis Kahn is a good name for a Mongolian restaurant but Toowoomba people tend to be, you know, conservative.”

Dave Wellings © 2006

ON TIME by Dave Wellings

2007-03-15T15:18:00.003-07:00

The elasticity of time can be a blessing or a curse. Some time ago, I wrote a short story recalling the trauma of a motor racing accident. I limited the story to 3,000 words but could easily have gabbled on to 6,000; the slow-motion sensation of the car somersaulting to destruction had lasted seemingly for hours. Logic tells me it would have lasted for less than ten seconds.

The idea of someone having their ‘time’ was suggested to me by the lives of two old friends. I had known ‘Gunga’ (short for Gunga Din) through infant, primary and high school. To say that he had blossomed into an attractive youth would be apt because he was indeed like an exotic plant, watered by flattery. From being a pretty-faced boy with rosy cheeks, ruby-red moue and a cute quiff that hung over his forehead, he had developed into a tall, handsome teenager. No one was more aware of this than Gunga himself: he could never pass a mirror or a shop window without whipping out his comb to primp the quiff and exchange an approving nod. His indestructible self-esteem was carried onto the sporting field where his elaborate bowling action would make today’s Sri Lankan spinners look boringly orthodox. He was equally visible on the soccer pitch in his brief tight shorts and flashy reflective boots, decades ahead of David Beckham. Being Gunga, he insisted on playing as striker although he had the build of a goalpost and to my knowledge never actually scored. If I have made him sound insufferable, I should add that he was an amiable, likeable lad who believed, quite rightly, that he was a chick magnet. It was no surprise to learn that shortly after leaving school he had married and started a family.

A few years later we met up again at the favourite watering hole of our old clique. It was a jazz club in the basement of a local hotel and I was home on leave from a Middle East posting. I barely recognised Gunga, standing alone at the end of the bar. His open raincoat revealed a small pot-belly; the famous quiff had gone and his damp hair line suggested an out-going tide. For the next half hour he poured out his woes to me – about his dreary home life where he was “outnumbered by bloody females” – a wife and two daughters. About the foundry where he worked, waiting for the foreman to die before there would be any hope of promotion. The foundry’s toxic fumes were apparently killing both of them. And then, reluctantly he shuffled off homewards, the flame quenched, the flamboyance gone.

My mate Terry was the opposite. He had been a gangling, awkward youth with a naff haircut and an ill-advised suit: he made ‘social misfit’ sound like a compliment. Like me, he had wandered around Africa and being a perpetual foreigner fitted him well. In middle-age he seemed merely odd. Although he was quite well off and generous (Africans soon realised he was a soft touch), he rarely spent money on himself. When the cuffs of his old shorts became frayed he simply turned them up and sewed them by hand, each turn revealing more of his spindly white legs. He darned the heels of his khaki socks with pink wool. By his fifties he was a true English eccentric: his rejection of materialism in an increasingly materialistic world would have made him a marvellous grumpy old man, a nugget that writers prospect for – a genuine character. Alas, he was killed in a motor-cycle accident and I felt he had been cheated. His time never came.

Someone once said that time was nature’s way of ensuring that everything didn’t happen at once. Albert Einstein confirmed that time was a relative phenomenon but it was an anonymous Queenslander who provided the indisputable truth: Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana.

Dave Wellings © 2006

MAISON GROTTE by Dave Wellings

2007-03-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

I can understand why so many writers grant the status of character to a house. It can be pivotal to the plot and a catalyst for events. Although twenty years have passed since I sold Maison Grotte and the residents have dispersed around the globe, we still refer to the place as we would to an amiable but slightly disreputable old friend.

I had bought the house on a whim. After several overseas RAF postings and an overland journey across Europe and Africa, I was ready to settle down for a while in Rhodesia. I had in mind a bachelor flat in a cheap suburb of Salisbury, perhaps with garage space to build another racing car. The Hatfield filling station doubled as the local real estate office and the jovial proprietor assured me he knew of the ideal property for me, not one hundred metres away. We walked back along the service road to a wide, squat house fronted by a solid stone wall. Large Grecian urns serving as flower pots topped the gate posts, in keeping with the formal Mediterranean-style front garden. The house had a distinctive style with flying buttresses on either side appearing to prop up the white walls. The original owner had been Portuguese, I was told, and the only surviving member of his family had moved to Cape Town. At that time many white residents were leaving the war-torn country.

“Rent it for a while,” the agent suggested, “And if you like it, buy it on Deed of Sale; you won’t need a deposit.”

“Buy it?”

The thought had never occurred to me but I could now see that there was indeed a large garage, as well as servants’ quarters and a chook house.

“It’s a bit bigger than I actually need…”

A masterpiece of understatement coming from someone with a backpack, a sleeping bag and a toothbrush.

“Four bedrooms plus five acres of land,” the agent cheerfully informed me. “You’ve got grapevines, avocadoes, pomegranates, quinces – every kind of fruit tree you could wish for. Do you like gardening?”

“No.”

“I’ll find you a gardener. Come back after five, I’ll make an appointment to view.”

The house was currently being rented by the de Witt family and when I returned at the appointed hour, they were all at home. Mum, Dad and the four boys were already packing to move to their new home and the place was in chaos. Every person and every piece of furniture appeared to be moving around simultaneously. I tried to keep out of the way while looking around the rooms. Nailed to the picture rail of every room at intervals of 12 centimetres were small painted wooden plaques of the crucifixion. Mr de Witt, a dour Afrikaner showed me around, then like a judge pronouncing a life sentence, he intoned: “Mr Vellinks, you vill be very happy here.”

The omens were good. A few weeks earlier at a cinema I had entered a competition – it involved writing a promotional slogan for the film – and I had won a rather grand hi-fi system. The prize arrived a few days after I had moved into the empty house. No longer did my footsteps echo on the stone floor, instead, Mendelssohn’s piano concertos and Dvorak’s string quartets bounced off the bare walls. I had by now withdrawn the nails from holding the pieces of wood depicting a man nailed to a piece of wood. The house felt happy.

My need was essentially for a base in town as my job as a field research officer involved working in the bush for three weeks in every month. Two of my work colleagues were in a similar position so I invited them to move in. My friend Steve with whom I had travelled across Africa, had grown tired of the YMCA and he too moved in. The house had suddenly filled up.

We were rarely there at the same time but I had engaged a young gardener who lived on site and provided security while we were away. The veggie patch and fruit trees he tended occupied less than half of the long narrow block. The far end of it was bordered by a stream, a tributary of the Hunyani River and during extreme winter droughts leopards would come to drink and hunt guinea fowl (and our neighbours’ chooks) – we rarely ventured down there.

The house was situated mid-way between the city and the airport making it a convenient stop-off for travellers in transit. Neal arrived one night from New Zealand, homeless and penniless and stayed for a few months until he found a job. My nephew, recently graduated from university in the UK, arrived to take up a job as a geologist and stayed with us for two years. There was always an eclectic mix at Maison Grotte; it was like an annexe of the United Nations.

One day our gardener begged me to take in a 16 year old African refugee. Chris and his mother were the only members of their family to survive the civil war in Mozambique and they had walked all the way from Beira. His mother had been admitted to hospital and Chris, destitute and exhausted had nowhere to stay. We offered him a camp bed, sharing the veranda with Iain who just happened to be the second son of a Scottish viscount. Neither objected.

The narrow veranda was enclosed by windows and stretched across the front of the house. We used it as a games room with table-tennis matches taking on international significance. A blackboard displaying the scores gave a clue to the residents of the time: England v Australasia, Europe v The USA, Africa v The Rest of the World.On Friday nights we showed films for the boxers I was training. Interspersed with the classic fights of Sugar Ray Robinson or Cassius Clay we’d have ‘The Champ’ starring Charlie Chaplin or something from Laurel and Hardy ( known to the locals as Mr Little and Mr Big). I would also show films of our boxers’ recent bouts and invite criticism – rather like the Clifton Writers Group…

The house was given its pretentious name as a joke. I had to explain to the Africans that Maison Grotte was French for Cave House and that grotty was also English slang for scruffy. Nevertheless, it became well-known and many international boxing tournaments, wrestling shows and pop concerts were organised over cups of tea at its modest kitchen table. There was another house popular with back-packers (or overlanders, as they were known in those days). The Palace was an inner-city house in Union Avenue and the inmates had tee-shirts printed: THE PALLUS – with a lower case ‘h’ inserted between the P and A. The place had a reputation for drugs and easy virtues and we took care to distance ourselves by having our own tee-shirts printed: Maison Grotte Cultural Centre. Again, it was meant tongue in cheek but as we were often seen on television at sporting events, it was sometimes taken seriously.

After ten years it was time to move on. Robert Mugabe’s Marxist government had run out of foreign currency and it was no longer possible for us to promote our international shows. The house was sold – again on Deed of Sale – and we all went our different ways. Payments for the house could not be expatriated and so, having moved to Melbourne, the only way to access the money was to go to Zimbabwe on holiday. I went back for the last time in 1987 and couldn’t resist one more look at Maison Grotte.

The front gate had been removed and when I went down the drive to the backyard I was surprised to see the old well which had been covered over for decades was once again in commission. I assumed that the new owners hadn’t paid their water rates. I knocked on the back door and called out a greeting in chiShona. There was no answer but I heard voices from the kitchen. I knocked again and opened the door. Six African women were sitting cross-legged on the stone floor around a kerosene stove, cooking sadza porridge. Most of them were nursing babies – the house was soon to be full again. When I told them who I was, they invited me to stay for some sadza but I declined and thanked them with the traditional hand clapping motion. There was no water, no electricity and the once-prolific garden now produced nothing but corn – for making sadza – but I suppose it was what they wanted.

I said, “I think you will be very happy here,” and left for the last time.

Dave Wellings 2006 ©

A BRIDGE TOO FAHRE by Dave Wellings

2007-03-15T15:03:00.000-07:00

In 1958 I was posted to a light aircraft squadron in Germany. I arrived at Detmold as an anxious teenager but was soon taken under the wing of Leading Aircraftsman ‘Butch’ Robinson. His nick-name was used in the ironic way that tall men are known as ‘Tiny’ or bald men are called ‘Curly’. He wasn’t butch at all but he was a born mimic and, like me, he was a Goon Show fan so any question was likely to be answered by Bluebottle or Eccles or Hercules Gritpipe-Thynne. He claimed he could speak German, he had a German girlfriend and he was certainly confident when speaking to the local civilians. However, I suspected he was often mimicking them as he once told me, “You don’t have to know all the words, as long as it sounds German.”

He had inherited a 1940 600cc two-stroke Panther motor cycle – or rather – he had inherited the locker that contained the bits of a 1940 Panther and had been told in uncompromising military terms to get rid of it. Butch naturally saw this is a challenge and enlisted my help to rebuild the machine over the winter. The frame and sidecar of the machine had been abandoned in a bicycle shed and were in poor condition but, with the surreptitious use of RAF tools and parts, the old Panther was brought back to life. In fact, it contained so many RAF bits that our Chief Technician said it should salute when passing an officer!With this eccentric set of wheels we were now free to explore the region. The Panther had no rear suspension, the seat itself was sprung like an old tractor seat and while I reclined in the sidecar, Butch sat up there bouncing in the breeze in his leather flying helmet like a cross between Biggles and Toad of Toad Hall. We attended dances in Herford, concerts at the Landestheatre and traditional schiessenfests out in the country. We invariably stayed out after curfew and could have been in big trouble with the Military Police but the ebullient Butch was never worried. While a menacing MP waited at the boom gate, Butch would ride up and call out in his best Gritpipe-Thynne accent: “I say, you there! Do fasten up your tunic, there’s a good chappie, you’ll catch a chill.” And then we would duck low to pass under the boom gate, leaving the MP to salute our exhaust.

The big test for the Panther came when we visited the Nurburgring for the classic 1,000 kilometre sportscar race. The first part of the journey, along the autobahn to Cologne, was no problem but then came the climb up into the Eiffel Mountains, to the famous circuit around the castle. It was well worth the effort as the race has gone into the history books as one of Stirling Moss’ greatest victories. We were still excited when we stopped at a gasthaus on the way home. Butch ordered “Zwei pilsener” and proceeded to give the locals a graphic description of the race, complete with sound effects. I don’t know if they understood his German but they certainly seemed entertained.

It was dark by the time we left and the headlight on the old Panther was little better than a candle on a windy night. Navigating the dark narrow lanes was a problem but eventually we came across a signpost declaring ‘Cologne 32 km: Cologne nach Fahre 17 km’.

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

“One is obviously a better road,” Butch said, “We’ll take the short cut through Fahre.”

We rode on until we came to another signpost: ‘Cologne 21 km: Cologne nach Fahre 6 km.’ We could now see the lights of Cologne but somewhere between the city and us was the mighty River Rhine. I held my map under the feeble headlamp but couldn’t see any place named Fahre.

“It’s probably some tiny dorp next to the bridge,” Butch assured me and confidently rode on into the darkness.

It was shortly after this that the road disappeared altogether. There was a sudden jolt, an angry hiss of steam and then a freezing wave of water, up to our necks. We abandoned ship and frantically dragged the machine back up the bank. From the direction of Cologne, through the velvety darkness I could see two lights slowly approaching – one red, the other green. Butch saw them too. Wet and shivering, all confidence gone he sheepishly admitted, “I remember now, Fahre means ferry…”

Dave Wellings ©

LACK OF WILL by Dave Wellings

2007-03-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

Shall you compare me to a summer's day ?
Not if you intend to be kind.
Comparisons are odious, they say,
So skip that one, if you don't mind,
Too many summers have gone under the bridge,
I've passed too much water too often,
I often forget why I went to the fridge:
My brain is beginning to soften.
An autumn day might be nearer the truth,
A day that was misty and cold.
It's hard to remember the spring of your youth
When you become grumpy and old.
Thanks - but no thanks for flattering sentiments:
Now is the winter of my incontinence.

Dave Wellings, Clifton. ©