My Dads Boss

My  homework  by Micky Edwards (aged 7)

23, Latimer Rd.,  Southampton, England, April 1943.

My Dads Boss                                                        

Mr Sneads fat and shorter than my Dad. Hes got a red, round face and a mousetash like Adolf Hitlers, and a pot belly with a watch chane hanging over it from one pocket on his waistcoat to another. Dad says the chanes made of real gold.  Mr Snead always wears the same dark blue suit with light brown shoes, which Mum says look low-class and dont go together.

Dad works for Mr Snead at Westminster Bank. Hes the chief clark and Mr Sneads the manger. The bank looks after peoples money so it doesnt get stolen by burglers and people like that. When the custermers want some money to spend, they write out a check saying how much they want and then the tellers give it to them.     

Mr Snead and Dad keep all the money in a great big safe in the cellar that has an iron door on it that ways about a ton. Nobody can go into the safe if they dont know a secret number and a special key thats made in two bits. Dad has one bit and Mr Sneads got the other one, and when they want to get more money they have to put their bits together to make one key that opens the lock.

          Dad doesnt like Mr Snead very much, and gets angry when he plays golf on work days, leaving Dad to look after the bank and tell all the people what to do. Sometimes he plays too days in a week. He tells Dad he only does it to build the business, so he can make friends with people who could be custermers. Dad says hes a lazy bugbear, and that when the bank inspectors come every year Mr Snead pretends he does all the work, and never tells them how hard Dad and everyone else does.

Mr and Mrs Snead havent got any children, but every Christmas they have a party in there big flat over the bank. The kids of all the grownups who work at the bank come, and lots of others from custermers families. There are little sardine and tomato sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and lemonaid and brandy snaps and playbox biskets and scones with goosberry jam on them. They used to have ice cream but now the wars on you can't get it any more. Mum says we wont see any ice cream again till peacetime comes.

          Sometimes Mr Snead has a conjerer at the party who can turn sheets of white paper into five pound notes with a little machine. Once my brother David, whose eleven, asked him for one of the notes, but the conjerer said he couldn't have it.  David said why not, wouldn’t it be easy to just make himself another one? But the man looked really cross and went as red as his Turkish hat with a tassel on.  Then he put the fiver in his pocket, made a mouse disappear and took a pigeon out of Mrs Sneads purse.

          The best thing about Mr Sneads Christmas parties comes just before we go home. We all go downstairs into the dark spooky bank.  Mr Snead gets out a cart they use to take the money in a lift from the safe to the counters where the tellers hand it out to the custermers. You can get four or five kids on the trolley, and we take turns. When wear all on it Mr Snead pushes us round behind the counters really really fast.  He shouts out all aboard, and then zoom, zoom, zoom as we go along, and turn the corners so fast you think your going to fall off.  Because we can't see over the top of the counter, it's like rushing through a dark scary tunnel in a fairground.

          But last Christmas the party was different. We were playing musical chairs just before we started tea when the air raid warning siren went off at the bottom of Canal Street. Mr Snead got up on a chair and told us not to worry and everything would be all right, and said to follow Dad down into the cellar where weed be safer. He said not to run, but to walk down the stares where weed be told what to do.

          We went down lots of stares and it was a bit dark down there. Dad and another man were lighting candles to make it look more Christmassy, and someone else carried down the gramophone and started playing records. Mr Snead got us all singing songs like Run Rabit Run and the White Clifs of Dover and Therell Always Be An England, and when weed sung for a while we heard guns firing. A few girls cried a bit but David and me started going back up the stares, hoping we could see the searchlights and the shells going off, but Mrs Snead ran after us shouting and made us go back in the cellar.

There must have been a lot of germans flying over on their way up the river to London, because the guns went on and on. By then, the grownups had brought all the food down and we played blind mans buff and charades and games like that. But then all of a sudden there was a great big bang not far away. Everything shook and little bits of whitewash and stuff fell off the ceiling.

Dad and Mr Snead must have thought a bomb might land on top of us, because they put their bits of the safe key together and unlocked the safe. They pulled and pulled to get the heavy door open, and then Mr Snead said come in boys and girls and dont touch anything.

So we all went inside and it looked like a sort of Alladins cave. There were shiny metal shelves with thousands and thousands of pounds of bank notes in bundles with paper bands around them. There were also little sacks of pennies and shillings and things, and lots of drawers with keyholes in them.

We all sat on the floor talking and the conjerer came in and told us jokes. They kept the door open and it was fun in the safe, and sort of exiting. But we hadnt been there long before we heard the all clear siren. Everybody walked out and went upstares again and Dad and Mr Snead locked the safe up. Dad told us later that Mr Snead wouldve lost his job if anyone knew hed broken the rules and let us go in that safe full of money. Dad said it was reprahensable.

Before we went home Father Christmas came and gave us presents. He was a fat little man with a red face and Peter said it was Mr Snead, but I knew it was really Santa. I got a kit to make a Spitfire and Peter got one for a Junker 87 Stuka dive bomber, the one with the funny turned-up wings.

On the way home we walked along Market Street and there was smoke going up in the air on the corner of Park Road. A bomb had dropped on Mr Gladwyns grocery shop at the corner of Park Road and Market Street. The shop was still burning and a fireman told Dad that Mr Gladwyn was all right but his wife was dead. She was sitting listening to the wireless in their sitting room above the shop when the bomb came through the roof.  There was an ambulance outside with its lights flashing and another fireman said theyd put Mrs Gladwyn in it.

Mum said we didnt need a big supper after eating at the party all afternoon, so when we got home she made us a fried Spam sandwich and a mug of cocco.

When I said my prayers at bedtime I said one for Mrs Gladwyn but David said that was silly, because she was dead. I really liked Mrs. Gladwyn. She was kind and nice and I cried a bit before I went to sleep, but quietly so David wouldn’t hear me.                                                                                                                                    

         

                                        THE END

       

Micky  Edwards

Michael Edwards: Good story, but very poor spelling!

See me.

Mr. Smales

A NATION OF GARDENERS

Napoleon labeled the English “a nation of shopkeepers.”  But he was wrong – we Brits are a nation of gardeners. Gardening’s in our blood, we love it and we’re good at it. Ask any group of Americans which nation they associate with gardening, and more often than not the English and the Italians will be way up there in the poll.

True, I may be a trifle biased about the Italians. I’ve seen their gardens, and they’re nice enough, so include them if you must, but they don’t quite match up to the Brits’. The Italian talent’s limited to gardens in the villas and palazzos of the wealthy, while in England the passion transcends wealth, class and social status, which I have to admit is a paradox in the world’s most snobbish and class-conscious country.

There are several reasons why we rate so highly in the gardening stakes. The first is that it rains a lot, and this is what makes the British Isles and Ireland so startlingly green, lending a chocolate-box beauty to even the humblest back yard, and making village cricket pitches look like pool tables. Perhaps this is God’s compensation for dealing them some of the world’s most depressing weather.

Two other reasons are history and good soil. The British have been on their knees and up to their elbows in rich brown earth, sowing and planting and weeding their plots for at least two thousand years. The Romans, originators of the Italian garden, knew a thing or two about horticulture, recognized good soil when they saw it, and so became the founders of an ancient tradition in Britain. This was later nurtured by the lords of the manor and the aristocracy, and perfected by such gardening giants as ‘Capability’ Brown, once a gardener’s boy who, in the mid-1700s, rose to become the greatest landscape gardener of all time. It was he who created what the world chooses to call ‘The English Garden.’

So what’s all the fuss about? What is a typical English garden, and  exactly what distinguishes it from those of other countries? Primarily it’s the antithesis of  the great formal, geometric gardens at the Palace of Versailles, or the lavish and incredibly beautiful spreads of the great Russians, Peter and, later, Catherine the Great near the Neva river in St. Petersburg. To begin with, there are no straight lines in the English garden, no neat rows or circles of identical plants, no disciplined box-tree hedgerows, and no rigid pathways. If you like, it’s the art of deliberately creating a disorder that is at the same time orderly -- a natural but deliberately balanced contrast of ying and yang.

If that’s too esoteric, here’s Dan Pearson, a London gardener quoted in an article in The New Yorker, who describes the English garden style with crystal clarity. He calls it “a juxtaposition of formality and informality . . . a controlled chaos, all tumbly and jumbly, where one plant is spilling and spraying over into the next.”  

In the same article Vita Sackville-West, author, poet, wife of writer Harold Nicholson and Virginia Wolff’s lover (and also, for decades, the gardening editor of Britain’s Sunday Times) explained the difference in just ten words when writing years ago about her own famous garden at Sissinghurst Castle. “If roses stray over the path,” she said, “the visitor must duck.”

The British are pretty good at grass, too. As the originators of tennis, cricket and soccer, they became masters of growing the perfect lawn, which is evident not only in sports fields all over the country, but also in city parks and on village greens, and in every dwelling place from hundreds of stately manors and mansions to millions of modest suburban homes. You’ll find none of that bright-green plastic stuff on the pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, or at the stadiums of top-class soccer teams such as Chelsea and Manchester United.

It should be said that gardening’s a great deal tougher in America, and even the most passionate and persistent American garden-lovers are up against natural forces about which their British counterparts know nothing. To begin with, there’s hardly a single four-footed species of plant-eating predator in England. True, there are wild deer in the national parks from the Lake District in the north to Salisbury Plain in the south, but they’re nowhere near as numerous or as voracious as their once-colonial brothers and sisters. They don’t sneak around the suburbs and open countryside by night and in broad daylight, gobbling up every new seedling and emerging shoot, or munching on hibernating flowering shrubs and newly-planted trees. The only groundhogs the English have ever seen were in a silly movie with Bill Murray, while rabbits have never proliferated in England since an outbreak of myxomatosis years ago. As if all this weren’t enough, American gardeners fight a perennial battle with the weather. It’s either too hot , too dry or too cold. Real droughts are commonplace over here, but rare in England.

There’s a story about an American tourist who stood amazed at the lushness and perfection of the lawns at King’s College, Cambridge. An aged gardener stood nearby, leaning on a fence, and the visitor turned to him.

“Gee, that’s mighty fine grass you got there, sir! I never saw anything like it. How do you do it?”

The old man took his hat off and scratched his head.

“Well,” he said, “There ain’t much to it, really. First you rakes it well and puts down some seed. Then you spreads ‘orse manure and bone meal on it, and waits for a bit of rain. Then you rolls it . . .”

“And then what?” the visitor asked.

“Well, it’s easy after that. You just  go on rollin’ it an’ rakin’ it every day for four or five hundred years.”

And that says it all.

NOT FOR SISSIES

Ye gods! I’ll be 85 in April. I’m an average-looking old guy of medium height, with all my own hair and pretty well all my teeth. You wouldn’t look at me twice in the street and, if you were going to ask a passer-by for directions, you surely wouldn’t pick me. No, you’d look for someone who looked more approachable and genial; more user-friendly, as they say these days.
It’s not that I look menacing or anything, but that, with my face in repose, advancing age – okay, let’s be honest, advanced age -- has given me a decidedly stern and somber look. In fact, you might take me for a curmudgeon. My mouth turns down and, with the lines on my face, you might reasonably suppose me to be bad-tempered and humorless, even sour.
Of course, the exact opposite is true, I’m kind to babies and small children, I brake for squirrels, and feel guilty when I have to kill even a moth or an ant. I certainly wouldn’t harm a mouse or a muskrat, so you might well say I’m a have-a-heart kind of person. And when it comes to humor I can be almost funny on occasions. Well, at least amusing.
They say that growing old’s not for sissies. They’re right. This gruff exterior makes me sad and wistful. I know you only have my word for it but once, as a soldier, a bridegroom, a soccer dad, and even on the first rungs up the corporate ladder (something by which we foolishly tend to measure success and failure) I was – I blush to say this – pretty good looking. What happened to that dashing young captain who sits in a silver photo-frame on my wife’s writing desk?
Time happened, that’s what. Okay, we all change with age, but in varying degrees. A lot of friends who are older than I (yes, there are still one or two) have nice, open faces and pleasant smiles. So why don’t I?
My wonderful wife, Lynn, normally a paragon of kindness, jokes about my glum appearance. She laughs aloud at the photos in my passport and driver’s license.
“Why didn’t you smile?” she says. “I was smiling,” I tell her.
I really was. Inside me, I could feel that cheery upturned mouth and the warm twinkle in the eye but, somehow, when the pictures came out, all that was missing was a prison uniform, with a string of numbers hung on a board around my neck.
My late mother-in-law, Erma, a lovely old lady with a Giaconda smile and handsome dark eyes, was a fountain of wise saws and sayings. One of these was that the living’s on the inside. By that she meant that many plain pug-ugly or unprepossessing people, and inanimate things, too, are often beautiful on the inside. She applied this especially to homes in mean, run-down streets, and to homely people, but the message was clear: never take anything at face value. Instead, search for the beauty within.
She was right, wasn’t she? All the same, we still go on making judgments based on external appearances. More than in most countries, you Americans put an impossibly high premium on good looks. Not so elsewhere. In my native Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, many relatively plain men and women have made it right to the top on stage and screen. They wouldn’t even have landed a walk-on part on Broadway, or in Hollywood. 
Don’t laugh, but behind my fossil-like façade I still believe that, physically and mentally, I’m that young man in the silver picture frame. My wife and I  published a novel a few years ago, a thriller set in exotic South East Asia. Mark Gregson, the protagonist (yes, they call heroes protagonists these days), is a young ex-Army officer. In my head and heart I’m still thirty-two year old Gregson, chasing heroin traffickers through the jungle; racing up three hundred steps in pursuit of thugs; saving his lovely girlfriend from drowning and, in the nick of time, disarming a booby trap under the hood of his rented car. The flesh may well be a little weaker, but the spirit’s still willing and, yes, the living really is on the inside.
King Duncan, in Macbeth, knew just what he was on about when he said: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”
So if you’re in your thirties, or even much older than that, kindly remember this when you pass some old geezer in the street.
Go on, smile at him, he might be me.

oo0oo

Mr. SPARKS

When I published the bio piece “Mr. Sparks” for a month last year it had a much more appreciative reception than usual. So I’ve decided to run it again for the rest of March for anyone who may have missed it. Here it is again.  JB.


Mr. Sparks

In England in 1942, when I was eleven and my brother David was almost fifteen, we lived in a house on a hill in the county of Kent. The hill, Stockers Hill was a steep, woody,  curving road that led out of a valley of apple orchards and vegetable fields to Rodmersham, with its neatly mowed village green, its towering, white clapper-boarded windmill, and a circle of trim cottages with diamond-paned windows that seemed to peer out myopically from under thatched eaves.

Half way up the hill,  just before its steepest point, and across the road from our garden gate, there was an oak park bench in an alcove scooped out of a chalky bank, where pedestrians trudging up to the hill to the village could sit and recover their breath before laboring to the top.

A high hawthorn hedge, maybe seven or eight feet high, hid the bench from our house, so that any occupants could only be spied from only one place, David’s bedroom window. They must have thought themselves invisible, for it was from that window, through slightly parted curtains, that my brother and I once stood speechless while we witnessed the true facts of life, athletically demonstrated on a hot August afternoon by a uniformed American airman and a local girl.

But there was another, more frequent occupant of that bench, an old man whose ancient hairy face is engraved even more vividly in my memory than those of passing lovers. We heard him before we ever saw him, and for a day of two knew him only by his high-pitched, phlegmy cough. My parents listened, sitting in deck-chairs on the lawn, and my mother, looking up from her book, murmured, “There’s a heavy smoker for you!”  But my father, who’d fought and been wounded in the trenches in World War I, said, “No, that’s a war gas victim if ever I heard one.”

On those first few days we listened to the stranger’s cough as he rose from the bench and struggled on up the hill, the sound fading into the trees as he rounded the bend. Then, one day, we heard him through the hawthorn hedge and, slipping upstairs, David and I stared out through the open bedroom window. Lounging on the bench, with his long legs stretched out, and his feet on the curb, a very old man in patched, ragged clothes leaned back with his bearded face turned up to the sun.

And then we saw my mother open the garden gate. What was she going to say to this old man? She walked across the road to where the stranger lolled in the sunshine. His eyes were shut; he might even have been asleep.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” my mother asked.

Evidently, he wasn’t asleep. His face lit up, and he eased himself painfully into an upright position.

“That’d be ever so nice, Mum,” he said. “Thank you kindly.”

It’s not unusual for British people to offer boiling hot tea on a summer’s day, even one as sweltering as that August afternoon. In, fact, there’s a widely held belief that it actually cools you down.  Back in the house, Mother put the kettle on the hob, and rummaged in the back of a closet to find a large, one-of-a-kind china teacup and saucer. On a plate that didn’t even closely match the cup she put several raisin cookies, a small jug of milk, and a few cubes of sugar.

My mother carried a tray to the old man on his bench who, rising, walked a pace or two to meet us.

“That’s proper kind of ya’, Mum,” he wheezed and, taking the tray, he put it on the ground in front of him.

She stood looking at him, which seemed not to disturb him at all.

“Where do you live?” my mother asked.

He didn’t answer her for a while, but leaned down to the tray at his feet with some difficulty, poured some milk into the tea, and stirred in four lumps of sugar. Then he leaned back on his bench, raised the cup to us as though making a silent toast, and took a sip.

The old man beamed. “Now that’s what I call a nice cup of tea.”

He put the cup down on the bench beside him. “I haven’t got no home, really, Mum,” he said. “I’m what they call ‘on the road,’ see? But in the summer time I ‘ave a place I go on the other side of Rodmersham.”

Later, we pondered on where he might take shelter in the winter time, when icy North Easters from Scandinavia swept over the flat, bare counties of Suffolk and Essex and across the wide River Medway a mile or two away. Nor did we know where he went down the hill every morning. And it was a while before we discovered where his ‘place’ was on the other side of the village.

One day soon after we met him, I asked the old man his name.

“Sparks, sonny,” he said, “Why don’t you just call me Mr. Sparks.”

“And how old are you, Mr. Sparks?” my brother asked, unaware that it was impolite to ask this of a perfect stranger.

The old man’s pale blue eyes twinkled. “Now that, young man,” he said with a little chuckle, “would be tellin’.”  

Mr. Sparks became a regular part of our lives. Every day, before he continued on up the hill, he carried his tea tray back across the road and laid it on the ground by the garden gate, and we always heard his loud coughing through the hedge when he came back the next afternoon. My father, normally the kindest man, even wondered aloud one day whether some of Mr. Sparks’s coughing wasn’t a subtle way of saying, “Listen, here I am, ready for my cup of tea.”

August passed, and we slipped into a long Indian summer, with cool September mornings and sultry afternoons that lasted into early October. Every afternoon, Mr. Sparks passed by for his cup of tea, and we grew to know him a little better. David and I would sit on either side of him on his bench, listening to the old man’s adventures. We heard tales, in his high, piping voice, of the Zulus and pigmies in South Africa, and the giant Hausa warriors on the river Niger in West Africa. There were horrible accounts of maggots in sea biscuits aboard the troop ships to India, and the agonies of frost bite at the Battle of Balaklava, during the Crimean War. Once we asked him whether he had ever married, or had children, but about this he was vague and evasive.

The first frosts came in October and then, one chilly November afternoon, Mr. Sparks’s bench was empty. A week passed, and another, but still he didn’t come. Should we notify someone and, if so, whom? After all, he’d admitted he was ‘on the road,’ which was a kinder, more friendly way of saying he was a hobo, tramp, or vagrant.  Mother suggested he’d moved south to the Sussex or Hampshire coast, where the winters are a little milder.

It was nearly Christmas when we learned more about him. There was early snow in the garden outside, and my father was reading the local paper. At the bottom of a page there was an item that ran for little more than an inch or two, telling how Ronald Sparks, aged about 80 years, a former corporal in the Royal Fusiliers, had been found dead after sleeping in the warmth of a lime kiln outside the village of Rodmersham. He was, the coroner said, asphyxiated by carbon dioxide gas that hung over the kilns on cold nights. The cause of death, the report said, was ‘not uncommon.’

Lately, now in the mid-80s myself, I’ve been thinking about Mr. Sparks and his stories about army life. Could he really have fought in the Crimean War? It took no time with an encyclopedia, many decades before Google,  to find that the war ended in 1856. Even if he’d been a drummer boy at that time, he’d have been more than a hundred years old on that cold December night in 1942. 

          So it wasn’t true. It saddens me that I doubted that grand old soldier.

          I wish I’d never looked it up.

IN THE DARK

This is the first story I ever published in a newspaper or periodical. Set in Britain, it appeared in the London Evening News early in the 1960s, but here I’ve re-set it in suburban New York.

IN THE DARK

Still in her bath robe, and cradling her coffee cup in both hands, Midge watched from the bedroom window as Guy drove out through the big iron gates to catch the 7:47 train.  He always left for the station at 7:30 sharp, and he never missed the train. One thing you could say about Guy was that he was predictable. While showering she remembered that today was his 43^rd birthday. She’d said nothing about this when they made their routine embrace on the landing. And nor had he.

          Downstairs in the kitchen she shivered and turned up the thermostat, and outside in the leafless mid-December garden a rising, blustery wind drove hailstones against the windows. She made herself some toast and another cup of coffee.

Every day began like this now that the twins had left home and gone to college. The house was empty, and so were her days. She hated this house, though her friends and relatives always told her how beautiful it was, and how lucky she was to have it. It was a big isolated, stone place in a rambling garden, built in the 1880s near Bedford Hills by Guy’s family. She and Guy had moved in ten years ago, after her in-laws had retired to Florida. Her own parents and most people she knew said much the same about Guy as they did about the house She was lucky to have him. He was handsome, good-natured and successful, they said. With Guy, the twins and  Rock House, what more did she want?

Well, what did she want? She’s often asked herself that lately. They had financial security -- Guy was a senior partner at a well-regarded publishing house on Madison Avenue – they had attractive, mature, civilized children, and they were healthy. The real problem, she told herself, was that she was bored. Bored with her own lonely existence and, yes, she might as well admit it, bored with Guy. Once Fiona and Zoe were both happily settled at Brown, Midge had called her former boss at the law firm where she’d worked in Manhattan, and he’d told her she could have her old job any time she wanted. That had been six weeks ago; she’d rabbited on about it to her family and friends, but she hadn’t followed it up.

She pulled on her raincoat and darted out to retrieve the Times, which today lay on the gravel drive in a blue rainproof  bag. By eight o’clock she’d read what little of the paper interested her. So what was she going to do with herself today?  There was something demeaning about her present situation, she mused. People made jokes about stay-at-home wives, baking cookies, going to coffee klatches, watching soaps. Guy’s forgotten birthday nagged in back of her mind. She supposed she should have taken the initiative for a change and, after a little subterfuge with his secretary, surprised him by turning up at the office and picking up the check at somewhere pricey and romantic in Manhattan.  But it was too late for that. So while she wasn’t the cookie-baking type she could, as a sort of penance, make her husband an apple pie for his birthday dinner here at home.

          Every fall, Guy gathered apples from their own orchard and stored them in a dilapidated but dry fallout shelter at the bottom of the garden. The shelter, barely visible from the house, had been built sixty or seventy years ago by Guy’s eccentric grandfather, Edward McKenzie. Neighbors had jokingly called it ‘McKenzie’s Mausoleum.’  It was dark and cold down there, and there were spiders, and so Midge hardly ever went there, preferring to get her husband to bring apples up to the house whenever she needed them.

          But today, partly motivated by guilt, she dressed quickly and slipped on her raincoat again, took a basket and a powerful flashlight, and headed down the path to the shelter beyond the wet, wind-torn  hemlocks and maples. She realized along the way that she was whistling between her teeth, something she did as a little girl, but now only when she was apprehensive or uneasy. She turned on the flashlight as she descended the five brick steps, and the steel door opened easily on well-oiled hinges.  Before her, under a low, vaulted concrete roof, was a narrow walk space with, on either side and at the far end of the little chamber, double-tiered bunks  covered with wire mesh, whose mattresses had rotted and been removed decades ago.  Now, on their horizontal wire racks, neatly laid out so none of them touched each other, were rows and rows of apples; red and orange and yellow eating apples, and oversized green cookers, perfect for pies.

          So intent was Midge on finding the most succulent apples that she barely noticed the wind had become even more violent in the garden outside, and it was only when a gust caught the door and slammed it shut behind her that she let out a little cry. She turned, walking back to the doorway, her hand suddenly trembling, and focused her flashlight on the door. At first she didn’t register that there was no door knob on this side, only a little black hole in the gray steel panel that must moments ago have held some sort of shaft on which a knob would normally fit.  Wasn’t that how they worked? On her knees she scrabbled on the concrete floor for the missing knob, but found nothing.

         

Back in the warm kitchen the answering machine clicked on. “We can’t come to the phone right now . . .”   Midge’s voice. Then another. A man this time.

          “Midge Honey, it’s me. Guy . . . you there?”

          There was a pause while he waited for her to pick up.

“I guess you’re out. Look, Midgie, bad news. I’ve got to go away for a while . . . ten days, or even a bit longer. We’ve decided to bring Charles Hudson’s second book out four months earlier than we planned. We need to hit the stores with it while his first blockbuster’s still in everyone’s minds. Anyway, Charles wants me go to his place in Vancouver and edit the book with him. I’m going late this afternoon. He won’t deal with anyone else. Says he wants the organ-grinder, not the monkey. Cheeky bastard. I’m flattered, but it’s a pain in the butt; there’s too much going on here in New York.”

          Guy paused for breath. “Hey, things are really buzzing here. I’ll call later. Love you.”

Back in the apple store, Midge noticed that the flashlight batteries were fading, and in a minute or two the light was no more than a watery yellow glow. Still on her knees, she groped in shallow space between the rough concrete floor and the lower bunk. She simply had to find that doorknob. The light was even weaker now, but she let out a hysterical laugh as her hand closed over something small and round. She had it! Dragging it out from under the bunk she examined the object in the last of the light. A child’s ball, that must have lain there for nine or ten years. With a frustrated whine she hurled the ball back into the shadows.

          By now the flashlight was dead, and still on her knees in the blackness Midge began to cry, her body shaking, partly with fear, but also because of the cold in this dark underground place. Where was that doorknob?  Almost certainly it was farther into that narrow space under the bunk than she could reach? She rose to her feet and, with the hesitancy of a child waking in a dark, strange room, groped around her until, in a corner, she knocked something over. An old garden hoe. She poked its handle under the bunk, waving it to sweep out any other object that might be lying there, but there was nothing. Midge turned slowly and repeated the sweep under the other bunk, finding only the dried-up fur and little bones of some long-dead animal.

          Tears streamed down her face as she crouched on the bottom bunk. Maybe there hadn’t been any doorknob for years. Guy probably knew this, and had learned how to open the door from outside without pulling out the rod that would normally have had a knob at each end of it. He’d never had any reason to open or close the door from the inside, so had never got around to mending it.

          Unable to see her watch, she had no idea what the time was, but guessed it was not much later than nine o’clock. The day had hardly started. It would be nine or ten hours before Guy came home. And how much longer would it be before he realized she was down here?

          For an hour or two, to keep warm, she paced the little walkway between the bunks. Only a while ago she’d been in her comfortable kitchen. She’d had another day ahead in which to do as she pleased. She could have visited friends. She could have taken the train, lunched with a girlfriend in Manhattan, and spent the afternoon at that new show at the Met. 

Later, much later, it seemed, Midge kneeled on the floor and peered through the crack under the closed door. Was this snow blowing under the door? She slipped her fingers into its cold wetness and shivered. Why hadn’t she got around to zipping the winter lining into her raincoat?  

          And all this was happening on Guy’s birthday. For the first time she wondered how her husband had felt when she hadn’t given him a special hug on his birthday, or even a card. Well, she had bought him a gift, but she hadn’t even wrapped it when they’d got up this morning.

          What a pig she could be to Guy sometimes. They always did what she wanted to do. Went where she wanted to go. They drove up to her parents’ place at Martha’s Vineyard for Thanksgiving, or Christmas. They’d only flown to Florida to see Guy’s parents in Florida three times in the past ten years, because Midge always complained that she hated Florida.  When Guy found her down here tonight, and they were back together in their comfortable routine, she swore she’d do something about all this. It was the least she owed him. Why hadn’t this occurred to her before? She sat down on the lower bunk, cupping her face in her hands. She was surprised, when she thought about it, that Guy had put up with her indifference, her coolness. Yet he was still around after nineteen years with her. He was special, and deserved better.

With his papers in one briefcase, and his laptop in another, Guy threaded his way across the concourse at Grand Central and just caught the 2:46 train.  He didn’t have a lot of time. If the train arrived on schedule at 3:45 he’d have about fifteen minutes at home to pack his bags and make his peace with Midge before the car arrived to take him to the airport.

A light snow fell as he hurried along the station platform to the exit. The car slithered on the bends in the narrow roads outside the town. When he reached home, Midge’s Toyota was in the drive. Good, he hadn’t missed her. Inside the front door he called her name, but there was no answer. The lights were on in the kitchen, and the radio, its volume turned up, played a piano sonata.

          In the hallway Guy shouted upstairs. “Midge. You up there?”

          There was still no answer. It wasn’t a mystery, he assured himself. She’d probably slipped out with some visiting pal on an errand. Maybe they’d made a quick trip together in the friend’s car to the market. No problem. Upstairs he packed his washing gear and a few changes of casual clothes. Nothing fancy. He and old Charlie Hudson weren’t likely to be dining-out in style. If past experience was anything to go by they’d be working late every night on a diet of take-out Tex-Mex and Chinese. In the bathroom he took a piece of soap and drew a heart on the mirror. Under it he wrote Goodbye, XX.

          He was ready to go, but there was still no sign of Midge. The car had arrived, a sleek black Mercedes, driven by a man in a uniform cap, who took Guy’s bags and put them in the trunk.

“Damn!” Guy said under his breath as he climbed into the back seat. He’d forgotten to buy a bottle of Charlie’s favorite single malt Scotch at that liquor store on Lexington Avenue. You couldn’t get the stuff anywhere else. Oh well. He’d probably find something almost as good at the airport.

          “Let’s go,” he told the driver.

          But then an idea occurred to him just as the car passed through the iron gates.

“Hold on a second.” he said.

OK, he may have forgotten that special bottle of Scotch for his favorite author and client, but suddenly he  knew what he could do. Wasn’t Charlie always bragging about the apples in his garden, and how much bigger, juicer and sweeter they were in British Columbia than in New York State?

Well, he’d show the old devil what real apples looked and tasted like. Whistling cheerfully to himself, he pushed open the car door. His feet slithered in the snow as he ran down the side of the house and along the garden path to the derelict bomb shelter behind the hemlocks and maples.

                                                oo0oo

A NICE CUP OF TEA

When things go wrong in Britain -- I mean really wrong, like widespread floods, transport strikes, or a truly serious catastrophe, such as the defeat of Manchester United or whatever your favorite team may be at the annual soccer Cup Final -- we know exactly what to do. In addition to keeping calm and carrying on, we have a nice cup of tea.

          Somehow, tea’s much more significant to us Brits than coffee is to you Americans. It’s a pacifier, a cure for anxiety and depression, a panacea. The wisdom in any crisis in Britain is ‘have a nice cup of tea, and everything will be all right.’ No panic, no histrionics. So jolly sensible.

It has to be said that most UK visitors say about American tea exactly what American tourists say of British coffee, that it’s weak and tasteless and, well, a bit like brown bath water.

Both are true, actually. But it’s not surprising that the British revere tea in the way they do. Their history in the last few centuries has been steeped in the stuff. I’ll bet that when Sir Francis Drake saw the Spanish Armada hovering on the horizon at Plymouth, the last thing he thought of was finishing that silly game of bowls. No, he sat down on the grass and called for a nice cup of tea.

It’s s a ruddy certainty that Lord Cardigan, standing knee deep in dead and dying redcoats after the Charge of the Light Brigade, invited Lord Raglan to his tent for a cuppa. And don’t believe that Sydney Carlton, the upper-crust hero of “A Tale of Two Cities”, crouched beneath the guillotine, waffled on about it being a far, far better thing that he did. Of course not! He asked for, well, you know what he asked for. This is, as former prime minister Margaret Thatcher once said about something entirely different, “The British Way.”

          We have to admit grudgingly that the Chinese discovered tea first, along with fireworks, medicine, astronomy, gunpowder, and a lot of other things. It was around 5000 years ago that the emperor Shen Nung inadvertently made the first cup of tea. While he was sitting in his garden, some camellia leaves blew into a cup of boiling water. I’ve always wondered what he was doing sitting there with a cup of boiling water, but never mind. Anyway, he was intrigued by its fragrant aroma, and soon decreed that drinking tea prevented illness.

          Then the Japanese copied Shen Nung, copying being something they’ve always been rather good at. Like the Chinese, they lauded tea’s efficacy as a cure for aches and pains, including headache, depression and constipation. They made quite a cult out of it with their tea ceremony. They also had tea-tasting gatherings, much like wine devotees do today.

It was 4500 years more before tea -- er -- percolated into Europe. It came from China in relatively small quantities by way of the Silk Road, via Asia Minor. Because it was scarce it was also ruinously expensive, so that only the aristocracy could afford it. Marco Polo had called tea one of the “world’s wonders,” and it was the Dutch who, in 1606, really discovered what he was on about, did a deal with the Chinese, and established tea trading posts, followed quickly by the French.

The Brits, with their trading fleets such as the East India Company, were a year or two behind their European trading rivals, but then, as Eartha Kitt put it so pithily, “An Englishman needs time.” It was largely the British who, with the help of the Dutch and the French, reversed demand with supply, making tea affordable for everyone. Tea quickly became the favorite English drink (at least for the upper classes) and the first teashops opened in London.

By the 1700s the national fancy for tea provoked excessive taxes, and tea smuggling became as common and as lucrative a booty as brandy or rum. And it was these taxes that provoked a slight altercation about tea in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1773. But let’s not talk about that.

It was, of course, the British who invented the real tea parties, which have no connection whatever with that vulgar incident in Boston. Before tea first arrived, the British had two main meals: breakfast and dinner. Breakfast commonly consisted of bread, beef and a flagon of ale. Yes, they had beer for breakfast, and nobody thought this in the least uncouth. Dinner was a protracted, massive meal at the end of the day. So it’s not surprising that aristocrats such as Anna, Duchess of Bedford, had a “sinking feeling” toward the end of each afternoon at Belvoir Castle, and began to invite her friends to join her for an additional snack. She served little cakes, and “assorted sweetmeats.”” And what else? Tea, of course. It was made in a silver teapot down in the kitchen and carried up by a maid to the duchess, who presided over the fine china cups and saucers, surrounded by her twittering guests. Occasionally the hostess would top up the teapot from another, smaller one, kept hot over a small spirit lamp.

The tea they drank at these gatherings would have been green tea from China and, later, Empire-grown teas from India and Ceylon and, later still, Kenya and Malaya. And it was in the days of the Duchess of Bedford’s parties that the “proper way” to serve tea evolved. China tea, being so much more delicate than Indian, was (and probably still should be) drunk with nothing added, though it was not unheard of to add a little unrefined sugar. But for most Indian teas, which have more flavor, and much more tannin, a little cold milk was acceptable, providing it was poured into the cup first. Nobody has ever offered a rational explanation of why this is important, or whether it makes the slightest difference. The snobbiest way to drink Indian-style teas is with nothing more than a wafer-thin sliver of lemon.

The British think the American way of making and serving tea a little . . . how should I put this? Uncouth?  People in the upper echelons of society there still look on the tea bag as an abomination, even though their supermarkets are full of them. Though, if pressed, most of them would probably admit they’ve used them on occasion. But no, those who truly cherish Britain’s favorite beverage use fresh leaf tea that’s been kept in an airtight tin container, protecting it from light, moisture, heat and anything that may contaminate its flavor. Indeed, the most pernickety tea drinkers warn the rest of us not to keep a batch for more than three months.

If you’re interested in how to make a perfect cuppa – unlike the millions content to dunk a tea bag in a cold mug of luke-warm warm water for a minute or so – there are one or two other things you should know. To begin with, buy a good teapot. The absolute ideal will be made of sterling silver, but a good earthenware pot will be fine, providing you warm it well with hot water before you begin brewing. Make tea with only the best water, because water tainted with chlorine, lime or iron, can make the finest, priciest tea taste like ditch water. Don’t over-boil the water, because this will evaporate its oxygen, making your tea flat and lifeless. Real gurus will advise you to wait a few seconds before pouring the water into the pot. They say that using boiling water when it’s ‘rolling’ will bring out too much tannin, making the tea bitter.

I’ll never forget an old radio jingle from Radio Luxembourg in the late 30s. It went like this:

“I like a nice cup of tea for my breakfast,

and a nice cup of tea for my tea.

And when I go to bed,

there’s a lot to be said

for a nice cup of tea.”

What else can I say?

Cheers!

                                      oo0oo

The Little Boy Who Couldn't

The Sacred Heart School in Sittingbourne, a market town in southeast England, was mainly a girls’ high school, but boys -- though heavily outnumbered -- were allowed there until the age of eight. I was five, and the place seemed to be a huge sprawling castle, entirely hidden from the town by high flintstone walls. Its centerpiece was its chapel, a miniature cathedral with gray stone buttresses and a lofty spire like a sharpened pencil pointing into the sky. Inside, the air was heavy with incense and the smoke from burning votive candles, and there was a pervasive and, yes, fearful sense that a grave, gray bearded God did indeed loom in its shadowy nave.

        There was an echoing gymnasium with slippery polished floors, seemingly unvaultable vaulting horses, and unclimbable climbing ropes that reached way up into the rafters. This was where, with the hall filled with folding chairs, we’d gather later to rehearse and sing Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture to welcome visiting bishops, archbishops, and, from time to time, beaming missionaries from Africa.

        And then there were the gardens, with dense beds of vegetables and flower borders as far as the eye could see, tended by some lower rank of nuns than our black-veiled teachers. In blue working habits tied at the waist with string, and ungainly wooden clogs, they waded waist-high among the lupines and delphiniums, and stooped over the cabbages and carrots with their rakes and hoes. Here and there in quiet corners were little stone grottoes, with gaudy statues of the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, St. Teresa, St. Francis  -- with a stone bird in his outstretched hand -- and poor Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows.

        Quarry-tiled corridors threaded through the school buildings, and around the kitchens and dining hall hung the permanent, sharp smell of boiling bones and cabbage soup. Up the uncarpeted stairs above lay a linoleum-floored reception room with hard, upright wooden chairs, massive sacred pictures and ceiling-high cases of holy books. Beyond this cold, forbidding place, behind a thick hopsack curtain hanging on wooden rings, was the no-go area of the nuns’ cells and the boarders’ bedrooms.

        Our classroom was mostly brown. The walls were brown, and so were the bare wood floors and ceiling. The gnarled oak desks with their little holes cut out for inkwells were brown, and the cracked varnish on the ancient wall maps had long turned golden. But the atlas of the world was predominantly red, covering Canada, most of Africa and Asia, Australia, New Zealand and countless islands in the Pacific and South Atlantic oceans. Red was the color of the British Empire, on which we were so often told that, literally, the sun never set.

I can remember the names and faces of several of my classmates, but none more vividly than Michael Cummings, a frail, pop-eyed, redheaded boy with freckles. Even though I never knew him well, Michael’s vulnerable face, and a three-word sentence he uttered one day in class, has haunted me ever since. Michael, we were told in whispers, had a weak heart, and because of this he always sat in the front row of the class in a wheelchair. Instead of a desk, there was a board across the chair’s arms, on which Michael could do his work.

        Michael made his indelible mark on my life at one of our early arithmetic lessons. The air in the stuffy room was heavy with concentration, and the only sound was the scraping of our slate pencils as we labored over the addition of single figures. Madame Ambrose, our only teacher, passed from desk to desk, looking down at our efforts over her gold-framed half-moon spectacles.

        When Madame Ambrose reached Michael’s chair, the little boy looked up into her severe face and let out a choked, anguished wail that I have never forgotten. It embodied desperation, fear and hopelessness.

        “I can’t do this!”   

        The boy burst into tears and no one could stop him. Madame Ambrose wheeled him out of the room and we heard his unhappy voice trailing far away down the corridors into the garden.

He came back next day, his eyes solemn and reproachful, but only a few months later he was gone. They told us he had died.

        Ever since, Michael’s cri de coeur has come back to me on occasions when life has threatened to become too burdensome. It returned during two long and temporarily crippling depressive illnesses decades ago, again with a wrenching divorce, and other crises of confidence that we all endure.

Little Michael was dealt a rotten hand from birth, and had an inadequate frame with which to defend himself.  I was hugely more fortunate. Even though, later, I might have said – not aloud but only in my head – “I can’t do this” during some of life’s most testing moments, I knew I’d had a fairer deal, and lucky enough to have the physical and emotional strength to face such challenges and overcome them.

But I do sometimes wonder how different my life might have been, and how I’d have coped with its problems, without that brief, involuntary lesson in life from Michael Cummings.

oo0oo