EX

EX

by

Geoffrey

Hellborg Moorhouse Smiles

‘Cosmic Smiles’

In memoriam 

Norma & Clare 

Thank You,

To everyone who found me,

those that loved me and

those that lost me.

With love

to my lover

and my friends, 

past and present,

who became my family.

To my dear daughter Saffron.

With respect to my fathers,

Goran and David.

&

‘Nanna’

EX by Geoffrey H Smiles is an imprint of

Windsong Press. Available as an Ebook &

Paperback.

Ebook ISBN 978-178456-746-0.

Paperback ISBN 978-152726-529-5.

Copyright G.H.Smiles 2020.

For further information, signed copies & details of publications

Email:    geoffsmiles@icloud.com

Or search the Web, Geoffrey Smiles for Literature and Art;

Cosmic Smiles for Music, CDs, T shirts and Prints.

Forthcoming Titles:

‘The High Way Code’ A magazine style abridged version of EX with photos by Greg Guest. Warning contains explicit imagery of drug use and nudity.

Unsuitable for the young or sensitive.

‘nEXt.’  Book 2 of EX. The further misadventures of the author.

‘Baradour.’ A satire on society set in a medieval kingdom.

‘The Four Seasons Diet.’ A humorous yet informed guide to health and longevity, whilst living a toxic life. 

The right of Geoffrey Hellborg Smiles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life of the author. In some limited cases the names of people or detail of places and events have been omitted to protect the privacy of others. The author states, except in such respects, the contents of this book are true. Any medical information in this book, relating to drug use or otherwise, is based o the author’s personal experience and should not be relied on as a substitute for professional advice. The author disclaims, as far as the law allows, any liability arising directly or indirectly from the use, or misuse, of any. Information contained in this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Prologus.

The ‘Long Eze,’ a tiny, two seater plane, seagulled down over Stonehenge, bellying out at top speed over the ancient circle. I looked down long enough to remember the days before the barbed wire had gone up, the History School Trip, the early Festivals, the night we tripped on Acid lying inside the circle, watching shooting stars and silver spaceships pass. I could only see the back of Alan’s head but I knew he was smiling.

Some minutes later the roar in the headphones crackled, Let’s do some Cloud Busting. I was watching the rush of small flocks of birds blur the fields below. The plane swung sharply to the left, I felt my stomach somersault. I smiled, Alan up to his old tricks; he never quite felt like he bonded with you until he’d nearly killed you or thrilled you.

I mumbled something, ‘Wow, amazing,’ while holding my guts down. I concentrated on the lurching horizon, begging my brain to do the calculations. Hurling in a small, clear domed plane wasn’t going to be pleasant, or cool. The trick, as I’d learnt in Kitzbuhel scraping the sick off Alan’s face, before I gave him the Kiss of Life, is to just keep breathing. No breathing, problematic. Breathing, in, out, good. OK, phew, panic over, right, what’s next?

The headphones crackled again, I remember the sun dazzling me as the plane levelled out after banking right this time. Geoff, I’ve got a Malfunction. During our friendship Alan and I had malfunctioned so often I paid little attention at first. He had an unrivalled ability to get himself in the shit, in the ‘Nick,’ or injured. Every kid riding their bike, hangs on the back of some car, sooner or later. Alan with great ease, but ill fated, had grabbed the Maidstone Bus, about three minutes before it did an emergency Stop.

I was certain, whatever it was, he could sort it out. If Alan did have a rival for ‘Monumental Cock Ups,’ that would be me. It’ll be alright Dude, I’m sure.

Geoff, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me flying and I’m only sorry that you’re in the back. I knew Alan had been in a terminal spin in a Microlight before. Hmm, worse than that.  I was trying to think what might be more awful than spinning headfirst at two hundred miles an hour towards Earth when the headphones crackled again and it was Heathrow Air Traffic Control. Alan updated me, They want to know how many passengers… he paused and sighed, they need to know how many bodybags to bring.

Now I was paying full freaking attention…It was the day after my adopted son’s eighteenth birthday and it was, for me… ‘The Perfect Day to Die.’

Like Icarus, I had ignored all the warnings and watched my wings, explode in flames. Yet, as I fell from social grace, I discovered the seams of darkness mined by those lost or unclaimed children in the fat underbelly of life. Yet Paradise was here too, diamonds in the dust, between the cracks in the pavement.

Life is a sweet bitch, a gorgeous honeysuckle fondant into which you dip the prick and fuck. Fuck for your life. I’ve been so alive I could die and so close to death I’ve never felt more alive. However, those points of ‘Ecstasy or Exit’ are often brief, long enough to realise the stuff was too strong, or shouldn’t I be on the other side of the carriageway?

Inspired by the heroes of another era, I climbed to the highest peaks, entangled myself in the jungles of uncharted lands and like the ultimate anti hero, on the greatest expedition to fail, I turned to my companions in the white wilderness and whispered, I’m going out for awhile, I maybe some time. I knew I was never coming back. Worst of all and hardest to bear are the bones of the Albatross about my neck, nailed to the flesh with twenty four words.

I am duty bound, as was the Ancient Mariner, to tell this story, again and again, in the hope it has Hope. Certainly not for any purpose of self aggrandisement, it’s too honest for that and I grew up in an era that frowned on ‘Blowing your own trumpet.’ One’s reputation and deeds should speak for themselves, whether a blessing or blasphemous. Lastly there is nothing worse than some over inflated, self obsessed, semi intellectual who pores over the minutiae of their life and feels it necessary to share every detail with the world. Who cares? None of us are that important. I know I’m not.

I was blessed with an unusual arrival on Earth and probably had one of the last really free childhoods. I only went to school properly for seven years but I was lucky to have nonetheless a great education. So good in fact, it betrayed the fallacies of its own limitations and hierarchical structures. Having discovered Freedom, there was no way I was ever going to let the powers that be enslave me. No, never. The only person who would do that, was me, to myself.

Luckily I found out how to escape, again and again. You can’t buy a ticket for the places I went to and if you could, it would read, One Way Only.

I made it back, sort of.

Now I am free. Forever. Hopefully, keeping the flame alight, in a very intense, demanding society, that is going through huge shifts of change, for better I hope.

It began, like most life changing moments, without much warning, one Winter evening in the Art Room, at Sherborne Public School. I was nearly fifteen years old. The diminutive Monk gave a Benedictine smile to the boys in front of him, muttering something as he held up a poem. Then he turned it upside down to reveal another. We listened, bemused, he was supposed to be a famous Concrete Poet, nothing to do with cement.

There were about eight boys, some had obviously opted for this as a better alternative to Prep. Anything to escape the House Master and the Prefects for a couple of hours before bedtime. I glanced above the Poet’s head at the mercurial reflections silvered in the vaulted windows, making his frocked body look like a beetle burrowing into darkness. His eyes turned to stare at me. I knew it was me.

As I looked at him, in the mirrored glass I saw a boy’s face glance at me, his blue eyes full of hope and trust, below his mop of blond hair. I turned away. It was the last time I saw the innocent child.

Yes….You… Dom Sylvester Houedard handed me a sheet of paper. On it he had written Vishnu and Krishna as one word, depending which way you looked at it. Above this a small embossed logo depicted a clay pot and the name ‘Prinknash Abbey.’ He breathed at me....It is a poem that sums up all life, no matter how you look at it

I replied, desperate to impress him, I am a Poet. My life is one long poem, no matter how you look at it. My English Teacher, Steve Frazier, who had booked the poet’s visit, winked and nodded at me. The Monk smiled as he scribbled the words across a card, turned them upside down and showed me. Doesn’t this sum up your life too?

I read the line as he showed it to the others, something about hope which turned upside down made god or dope. It was interesting as it was so unusual. English texts we studied were drawn mainly from the classics. Those two hours with the Monk, like two pages of Zhivago, would change my life forever. My weakness then was my Innocence. It was his too.

His garlic breath brushed against my cheek as he circulated after the reading. Ahh, the Poet! You must send me some of your poems.

I was thrilled, over the Moon. That offer changed my life forever, though not quite as I had wished.

This moment of life, lured me down a path, it nurtured my dream and I took it, but it cost me dear. I fell from grace, being expelled. Exiled! Excommunicated from the chosen few.’ I would be banished for life from those high stone walls to the hard stoned streets. Ex Public Schoolboy, ex son, I would become a lot of Ex’s during my exodus. The years of my childhood ended that night.

That death hurt me less, as I was steeled with the resilience and idiocy of youth, than years later when the Benedictine hierarchy at Prinknash Abbey, brought that boy to life again. Only to cut his throat, lest he dare to speak out. For the Truth stinks in a world where lies rule. However, I discovered that ink cauterises wounds and I shall write on, regardless, fearless.

Meanwhile, my job was to watch the two petrol gauges in the back of the Long Eze. The plan was to burn off as much fuel as possible before attempting a crash landing, but preferably not all the fuel. My mind was crystal clear, I was paying full attention to every detail. I wasn’t thinking about all the money I didn’t have in the Bank, that’s for sure. But up there, waiting to die, your mind searches everywhere, adding up Nothing, subtracting Everything, desperately trying to solve the problem, the equation of life.

More images were coming…

Alpha

The lightning struck. She was there. A silver halo blessed the bedroom, her smouldering mahogany eyes stared at me, the tempest of rain pummelled the midnight black window pane...A lonely lion’s growl of thunder prowled across the returned darkness. Unafraid, silent, I watched, as her outline faded into the storm laden shadows, until all I could see through the bars of my cot were Her eyes, locked in mine. Beside her, next to the couch, an open door led to an obscured shade beyond. This moment was engraved on first page of my memory. The lightning struck. She was gone.

Three years earlier I came into this day-life by way of Chuquicamata, in Chile. A fairly unknown, inconsequential but extremely large hole thousands of feet up the Andes mountains. The hole was caused by mining copper, which my Swedish father was somehow involved in, shipping or selling goods abroad. Being born under the zodiac sign of Capricorn, the mountain goat, I was amused to find out years later, that the tropic runs right through my place of birth, albeit that the exact location is now suspended in mid air.

By the end of my first year of life I had broken a leg, cut my wrist open, travelled six thousand miles and most likely had a grubby hand in the malaise and breakup of my parents marriage, or supposed marriage. It wasn’t a particularly auspicious beginning to a lifetime of unbridled lack of success. Even more so when my mother later arranged a divorce from her Swede, Goran Hellborg and discovered as she hadn’t lived in Chile long enough, before her marriage, it was never legal in the first place. The rule was that you had to be living for at least a year in the country before you could marry. This was welcomed by my mother Norma and her second beau David.

The adults were now spared the painful process of sorting out her divorce but I used to joke that I doubted they spared a thought for the fact that I was now to suffer the ignominy of being a Bastard! Suddenly, I would lament in later days, I was a social outcast down at the Nursery. A social outcast condemned to sip my milk at break under the table, in incontinent revenge, rather than enjoy the luxury of teachers warm lap and her voluminous cushions of breasts? Gosh I don’t half come up with some bollox.

However, this cycle of a ‘Legitimate’ beginning to be later proved....illegitimate, even unwanted and exiled, was to become a recurrent theme in my life. It was one of the first examples of the God’s, not forgetting the Goddesses, playful jocularity with my existence. In later life I got the hint and returned their jest by using my mother’s maiden name as my surname, clearly stating my insouciance for life’s dings and sorrows with Mr Smiles.

I found as a teacher of ‘Wild boys,’ many years later, as they were hurling books and chairs at me, I was able to halt their flow of abuse with a disconcerting nod every time ‘Bastard’ was used. I sure am! This often led to a digression, to relate the aforesaid tale and occasionally peace returned, occasionally!

I knew none of this then. In my play land of heroes and villains I had no idea the good doctor wasn’t my dear father. I’d prefer to fantasise, another recurrent theme in my life, that as a cheeky blond, blue-eyed child I was able to charm the ladies into their red lipsticked kisses and more importantly into buying me bags of chips, as I had an insatiable appetite for the first fifteen years of my life.

However, the reality was that as a toddler I was an unstoppable, snot smeared, smelly bundle of mischievous trouble. I trashed my cots, usually breaking through the bars to escape and leaving only a damp mattress as a clue to the misdemeanour, another recurring theme in my life. Most heinous was I poured the first bottle of Chanel perfume my mother had ever been given, down the toilet. It may not seem much today, but to a poor young nurse in the 60’s it was the equivalent of pushing a chap’s E Type Jag over a cliff. She wasn’t happy. I also axed my Uncle Bill’s Teak tool box to bits, the one he made during his apprenticeship. So that was two death threats on my life already! God I was trouble.

I talked all the time. I talked to myself if nobody was there and I talked even more in my sleep, I still do loudly and convincingly. Once, when I was farmed off to relatives they thought that somebody was burgling the house downstairs. When the police investigated they found me blabbering away fast asleep. I was always in trouble even asleep!

My poor Nanna got lumbered with the job of looking after me most of the time. She had to put aside money every week just to pay for damages. I’d come sneaking in with a dribble and a few tears trying to hide my despair, dragging my nappy behind me, round my ankles. What a sight! Nan would look up to heavens and speak to God in a way only miner’s wives can do, for their’s is one of the hardest lots by far.

I think if my mother had been given the chance of a refund with a bottle of whiskey thrown in for damages, then she would have probably settled for two ‘Fingers’ on the rocks rather than two lives on the rocks.

Perhaps her training as a State Registered Nurse stood her in good stead for the assault to come, at least together with my step-father, a General Practitioner, we were able to mop up our own blood. Another doleful irony was that my grandfather was an ear and eye specialist, albeit half blind and stone deaf and my parents were both in the medical profession so during my childhood they often pestered me about how one day I should eventually go into medicine and how proud they would be of me. All I heard from the age of six was the phrase, Geoffrey we’d like you to go into Medicine. The tragic truth was I did go into medicine....like a duck in a dirty pond.

Although the adults and the Gods seemed to have formed this plan there was always the delicately refined brush stroke of life that painted a different portrait,  The creative artist, a young vagabond, roaming the seashores and verdant fields of childhood imagination. By chance my four year old wanderlust and wild spirit were nurtured by moving to a child’s paradise, Seascale, Cumberland.

The seashore slept, snoring away on the other side of the railway tracks, a door mouse to eternity. Within her sonorous silences she could threaten a rage to rout the stoutest knight of her royal blue realms. Her deep gaze entranced the child with whispered stories blown in on the sea breezes and as the tide would recede over the naked sands, above the ribbed roar of vanquished waves, the gossamer threads of a refrain ‘ Sweet bonnie boat like a bird on the wing, over the sea to Skye....’ would lead and lullaby him, farther and further from home.

The sands rushed knuckle-deep beneath the palms of wet feet that crushed castles and moats at a moments whim, leaving the princes and princesses of imagination to mourn beneath the cries of swooping Seagulls. Each expression of the hour would sit like a fat Magpie on the tender breast of the beach. She lay down her naked body beneath the waves of Neptune’s trident. The young boy wished also to conquer her, with his shipwrecked galleon the curiosity of the unknown. In every mud baked son there is a warrior dying to be free, to bluff the rough hands that deliver the slated spray into her white crested womb. She lay before him, outstretched on the breakers, in his wildest dreams, undressed, untamed, unforgiven; as he rode the blooded stallion over every wind whipped dune and rivulet of fallen tide.

In the near distance, he could hear a shoal of stony hump-backed whales; muscle bound, sea weeded, black rocks, muttering beneath their barnacled breath about the importance of being sternest. As impotent waves dashed at their feet, making petty bourgeois vowels, playing with the shells of daydreams, poking pink starfish and other such lugubrious unmentionables. The hard, the sticky, the sucky and the slimy. These quaffs and quibbles occupied my curious eyes on sharp fingers, every nook and cranny an endless source of ocular gossip.

Amid these furores of tempest and temptation the child wandered, accompanied by the whistle and hum of an endless unfinished symphony. Even then the strains of a mocking bird would pester the future poet. Whispering in the Windsong, melodies and modal chordal grumblings of grief and joy, caught between the young tongue and gap-teeth. The Song of Solomon warmed by dulcet sirens would glade across reflections of earth and sky. Tunes for martyrs with missionary zeal would conjure and conjugate with nursery rhymes, milking the virgin flesh of a boy’s imagination.

Every touch of Mother Nature slept silken on the smooth skin of bronzed youth. His hummingbird heart ran and ran forever beneath the brush and hush of emotion. From the Aga throne of breakfasted Uncle Toms and the very fat spinster Mrs Thin, the wide grin of youth would reach out for a blue-sky million miles over the day ahead. Never looking back the scuffed shoes would scurry out the back door, seeking the quest of beach-combing every bleached turtle of sandy creation.

Thus, I slowly discovered the charms of the seaside, playing for an endlessly changing backdrop of seasons on the sands and in the pools and rivers that marked her divides. These were all fed and watered by the gentle mist like rain that fell into the tributary streams from the cooling towers of the Windscale Nuclear Power Station. Beneath those giant concrete tubes I used to refresh my brow on hot sunny adventures and marvel at this continuous rain, while searching for tadpoles in the sewage tunnels that ran deeply and mysteriously into the darkness beyond the barb wire fences. I certainly had a glowing complexion! Perhaps being born next to a copper mine, stood me in good stead when it came to playing with plutonium.

Although I was very young the black cloud of Death came to gloat on my horizon twice; making me aware that out of the blue this stranger would appear from behind closed doors and suddenly somebody was no more. 

The first death was the father of my friend from up the road, he worked at the power station and leukaemia claimed him. I can’t determine if that was related. He would have been a patient of my father and I wonder if he had noticed a trend towards those diseases. But after my sister Clare was born there was talk of our moving away one day. Dear Dr Moorhouse was a bright adventurous man in his own right.

The music of Mother Nature and the sea in particular had entranced me, my mother added to this aural delight by playing me ‘The Tempest’ while she ironed in the small upstairs room. I would sit on the floor amongst the clothes wrapped up in sheets like the sails of that famous ship, soaked in Prospero’s magic and

Caliban’s sorcery.

Although I can’t remember her playing much Bessie Smith or Billie Holliday then I expect I heard these artists and Mies Davis too as I played at her knees. No doubt she might have put some Blues on to announce the second death which came with a present, a tennis racket. My mother reached down with the strange gift and said it came from a friend whose son had died. How did he die? I asked with plaintive interest. He died in his chair while his mother was out in the kitchen, when she came back in the room and he had simply died. I probably followed my mother around for a few days after that and I wondered if the unseen giver of my tennis racket with the navy blue taped handle had wanted me to have the racket? How was it that he could just die while sitting down? It didn’t make sense.

I would take away these thoughts on my wanders, to the hammer of the trains that trundled down towards the muddy delta of Ravenglass, or puffed up to the fiery point at St Bee’s Head. These distant names were the outer limits of my life which was spent of the beach, or over the cinder track, down which the faceless, bent over, workers would cycle to the power station, passing the tunnels that reached with their fingerless echos through to the silence of the Seascale Golf Course.

This was my other world of deep green reverie, on the beach the breath of the sea was always in my ears, with never the grace of a moment’s silence. It was this omnipotent voice that the old visitors and beach combers loved, for it stilled their nervous daly life to a becalmed thought, laying it down, securely marooned, far from the reefs of trauma and tribulation, called ‘Life.’ Yet as I crossed the cinder trail and scurried through the tunnels under the railway, the door would shut on the sea’s voice. All that could be discerned was a foreign murmur beyond the gunwale of the adder’s embankment, like adults downstairs at midnight; above which, only the scream of a seagull rose, from time to time, like adults.

The wind whipped grasses would bend to the soft marshy fen and hunkered desert bunkers, from where I searched the sky; flat on my sandy back, spying for enemy clouds and waylaid galleons. I knew how to avoid the stray golfers in their handicapped abandon, so that I could cloak my will-o’-the-wisp adventures in the clandestine wilderness of utter freedom.

I was the Solitary Reaper of my imagination; etching child’s poetry in long shadows on wordless clouds, gritty and rough, untarnished by the sand of paper and line of pen. Here I gathered my daydreams and nightingales around me like Persian jewels, to whom I unburdened my thoughts, as sincerely as a man lies to his mistress.

In the windless coves behind the line of unbleached driftwood, I hoisted my secrets on a creaking windlass to heaven’s gate; beyond whose grey cumuli some seasons of childhood were lost.

Beta

A shaft of sunlight lay across the aisle as the stewardess bent down to click the belt. The lion’s roar purred beyond the wing tips of the horizon. The roaming hoards of wind winnowed clouds bustled across the seas of sky, bobbing boats below billowing sails. The lights of Heathrow began sliding away and the great awning that had mesmerised the boy’s dreaming eyes on the beach was rushing down towards him. Through the jet window of opalescent light, he discovered the enormous circus top of the Earth for the first time and he danced with his eyes across the blue boulevards.

The initial shock of leaving the grey rain stained streets of London to climb so graciously into the womb of eternity silenced our family. Even my new baby sister, Clare, gazed from beneath her bonnet, with limpid calm towards the endless afternoon-ing sun. Relinquished at last to the velvet vespers of twilight that settled with bell laden sobriety beneath the covers of night.

The baby’s eyes closed as she purred herself to sleep. There had been a brief eddy in the shallow stream of my consciousness by the sea when I was called to my parent’s bedroom to be introduced to my sister. She lay there, an abundant bundle of dozing blankets with a tuft of blonde hair, serene and secure. I was impressed, but not sure what my reaction should be. After an askance glance I was ushered out to continue my life pretty much unmolested by her presence. People often talk of magnificent episodes of brother sister interaction, much of which is hell bent rivalry; but it was as if we were both in ‘Single child’ families. Six years is an incredible abyss during childhood, but this was made worse by the fact I was running so fast ahead.

We used to play, I’m sure, from time to time, but much of this was led by me, as Clare looked up to me metaphorically and literally. If only I had understood how much that little girl adored her elder brother. But I was way too young and wrapped up the unfolding adventure. We followed our own courses of evolvement, at entirely different times, but remarkably we ended up at the same point. Though we meet infrequently we are bonded by the story of a family life we read from entirely different angles. We both press on with passive belligerence, somehow inured through our early training to expect, even to welcome, the Fall from Grace. This paragraph was written before her final nemesis. I’d like it to stay, even though it’s inaccurate now, because for a few lines at least I can believe she’s still alive.

A black silver, starlit, sky ascended, as the plane landed in snow-piled shoulder high, icy New Brunswick. A car waiting outside welcomed the family into its wood lined world. The first gusts of arctic winter rushed like waterfalls of icicles to the bottom of our lungs, catching our breath in misty balloons of exhalation. Endless Fir trees sped past as the dawn brought them to Moncton. The strangely tuned voices of fur-lined adults filtered down to my bobble-hatted ears. We stayed here a few days and then moved to Middle Sackville.

Most of this first season was spent watching. Some understanding of the new beginning was heralded in my consciousness. The tin soldiers who guarded his castle dreams awoke to find foreign swords wrapped in maple leaves beneath their belts of bracken.

Here the wind worn words of ‘Sand’ and ‘Seaside’ were divested of their cobble stoned communication, stretched upon a new canvas they were over painted by ‘Forest’ and ‘Lake.’ I learnt that the patchy snow, which had betrayed my father’s efforts at making a sledge in Seascale, to my wingless sorrow, was in an abundance in Canada that rivalled my coldest dreams.

Through these tunnels and turrets of ice kingdoms I could secrete the espionage of welly booted childhood. This first lesson in swiftly changing worlds taught me a tolerance for new beginnings that has never left me. That first morning in Canada, I went outside after breakfast, in my bobble hat and coat to explore this strange place. There was snow, snow, snow, everywhere.

I knew I had to make friends, now I had left my old ones behind. I’m not sure why that seemed so apparent to me but it was my first thought. So at six years old I went in search of random people, whom I went up to and introduced myself. Hello my name is Geoffrey, I’ve just come from England. How do you do? I’m sure this must have tickled a few folk. But the lesson I learnt that morning, was the understanding that new roads had to be embraced, new pals made, new adventures taken. It has never left me and stood me in good stead for the many changes to come.

We stayed briefly in Sackville where my father was going to work at the hospital, before moving five miles out of town to Middle Sackville? Here we had a huge wooden house with a tree lined drive and gardens, opposite School Lane, which sloped down and then back up to a playground. A safe haven for a young adventurer. But the best thing I thought was down the road, past our house, Silver Lake. It was my new sea.

Contrasting the cold winters, summers burnt to the other extreme, with oven baked trails through the undergrowth of Lincoln Continental size forests. Fields at the side of the house ran for a mile down the dusty road past a few shacks and more wooden barns and farms. Then the road dipped and ran down to the bridge. Beneath this, stretching as far as my imagination could see were the rippled reflections of the lake where I would swim for weeks, diving for days, like a Kingfisher.

On the bridge the keen eyes of young fisher boys plucked the black, writhing wriggling snakes from the cathedral shadows below. Cutting off the silent squeal of the eel’s head to watch the dust peppered phallus perform its brutal ballet of death. Once only, Daddy and I went to fish. We caught a minnow, which I buried amid hushed ceremony in the back garden.

My father was a quiet plodder of a man, pipe smoking in between cigarettes. He had a stalwart spirit that trudged on no matter what hour of the day or night it was, ever serving the community to the highest possible level of observance to duty. He was a deep thought. From behind his grave wrinkles, puffing for Britain in his chair, he spoke truths and good advice; his Love was a kiss goodnight, turning back to his paper. I listened to his words, then and now, still assured I never met a more intelligent worldly man. I worshiped that ground...if I had to sum up the entire wealth of what he gave to me, it would simply be one word, the best word a man can give to a child, a word that will foster a lifetime of beautiful behaviour. ‘Integrity.’

His road was a straight, narrow thoroughfare, where the public came and went, better for his presence; while we waited in the lay by, for the eight thirty tired homecomings. A glass of Captain Morgan’s dark rum planted in his right hand, the left clutched warmly about the bowl of a pipe, his silent watching. A doctor has two families to care for, we were the second. However I never doubted his utter love for us, it was just that the other family numbered us in their hundreds and this was the era when a GP could be called out three times a night and usually, at least once during dinner.

I didn’t know it then, but we had met for the first time on the beach at Scarborough, it was his birthday. I was apparently the best birthday present he had ever had. Yet like all presents one doesn’t pick somehow they are not quite what we might have chosen ourselves. In looking back my father appears on the flight there and carried the fishing rod, but seems to vanish for years into some other echelon of existence, making occasional appearances, sometimes with a slipper in his right hand to chastise me early to bed.

My first major ‘Slipper offence’ was being coerced into saying Puck with an ‘F’ to my mother by some older Ice Hockey players. I can still see the ice, the air misted with falling snow and sprays of frozen beads fleeing from our sharpened skates. It was cold and the boy’s had collared me in an alcove of snowdrifts tutoring me in this new word. My reasonably good repetition of it later that day occasioned such a surprising reaction that the tool in the young boy’s mind was sharpened deftly. Not so much the swearing, but the power of one word to create a dramatic reaction.

The second offence was for Firearms! Blimey, I wasn’t even seven yet. I had some friends, who were friends with a boy who was a tearaway. His father was dead, I knew that and thus his mother gave him free rein and he had a pellet gun. On that day we were roaming ice warriors, who shot the windows on an island cottage; which had been betrayed by the Winter freeze. It meant we could cross the lake to attack it. This was my first official bust, in the middle of our Bebe gunshots pinging off the wood we heard skidoo engines hurtling over the lake towards us. We all ran for it back across the ice and dived into the woods beyond. Breathless, I hid behind snow laden bushes, as the bigger boys trusted to their long legs and vanished. They were gone.

With the angry shouting of the men, asking for anyone to come out before they came in, with guns blazing I imagined, I gave myself up. However, I brazenly arrived home that afternoon and never mentioned a thing about spending an hour down the Cop shop getting cross examined. But the police informed them the next day. Guilty! At six and a bit! They really ought to have heeded this early warning and had me locked up then, for pissing in the face of law and order. But they let me go free, as they would years later.

The third sin was to forget Grampa, father’s side, playing volleyball late into the summer twilight. I had been told to come back early to sit with him as my parents were out, but I was totally engrossed, with some new friends I’d met that day, until somebody mentioned it was ten o’clock. Oh dear. Then it was the knock kneed, trembling walk, run home, with tears starting to wobble down my woebegone face. After the beating from my father I would be sent straight to bed, where I used to undress unbuttoning my shirt from bottom to top! I was really really angry now!

But beneath, beyond, buoyant, I trailed a blaze of boyhood adventures, like a forest fire through the redolent pastures of home. In black caped and leather booted pursuit of Zorro I enacted the cloak-and-dagger plots of a stage peopled by secret agents, little folk and invisible friends. I called myself Alexis as I felt attracted to the name, it belonged to a friend of mine. I had several accomplices who lived down the dusty lane that ran to the old timber framed school, past Hashy’s and the duck pond. Hashy was a poor man who lived with the smell of his chickens in, on and under numerous piles of magazines and newspapers. My mother used to send me down with bits of food and cake for him, but I used to drop in anyway by myself, to stare in wonder at this strange man who didn’t fit into any category I’d ever known before.

I also had a special friend from whom I bought a James Bond briefcase for