Story number 10 Train Talk

Hello friends,

Something, I hope, to amuse.

Very best wishes from Philip

Train Talk

                                                                                                                                    Mr. Dubois was not what you would call a shy man. He was congenial and popular with his friends. His quickness of wit and freshness of spirit lent a delightful breath of extempore to the stuffy drawing rooms of late Victorian Dewsbury.

To some, his disregard of etiquette overstepped the limits of bonhomie but to the majority his intractable sense of fun brought welcome relief.

The day promised to be a hot one. He wondered if he shouldn’t have avoided the tweed suit and gone for sometimes light, but his client was not a modern thinker and he didn’t want to ruffle his hidebound feathers unduly.

 The journey from Dewsbury to Leeds was uneventful enough. The carriage was but half full which allowed ample room for spreading his paper at ease and, with legs unconstrainedly crossed, burying himself in the latest from the Boer.

“There’ll be just time enough to down a cup of tea at the station” he thought to himself. The buffet was right at the other end of the platform. There really wouldn’t be sufficient time but the dilemma between realizing his desire and bowing to common sense had yet to thrash out their differences. A large queue decided the question and, mentally planning an immediate diversion to a tea shop on arrival at York, he gave a reassuring squeeze to his neck tie and positioned himself on the platform. Within minutes the train arrived, with the very last compartment stopping directly in front of him. Taking a firm grip, he swung open the door and let himself in. As they pulled away, he just had time to see his paper on the bench where he had left it.

“How maddening!”

The compartment was stuffy. His collar already beginning to rub mercilessly on his neck.

“Do you mind?” he directed towards the only other passenger, as he leaned up to open the window a little. She said nothing but remained motionless, her head inclined towards a thin volume she secured between grey kid gloves.

“Very hot, Madam, don’t you feel?”

The lady continued reading. Mr. Dubois’ eyes wondered to the advertisements above the dark green upholstery.

“Enjoy a bracing sojourn at Skegness!”

“Has Madam ever visited Skegness? He ventured. “I believe it is most bracing”.

Still not a word. Mr. Dubois began to observe her. She was probably about his age, something between fifty and sixty. She was wearing a cavernous black hat that resembling a collapsing meringue with a rather impertinent plume bobbing incongruously at the front.

“How dull!” he thought. “An hour and a half with a taxidermic contender and no paper to alleviate the boredom”.

The woman was draped from head to toe in black. She wore jet beads that ran from her high collar and terminated in a squat bog oak cross. She was compacted in impregnable taffeta. Tightly crimped lace besieged her neck and wrists; he wondered how she could breathe at all.

“It really is most intolerably hot. Does not the lady desire that I open the other window to facilitate a refreshing passage of air?”

Her kid gloves twitched slightly and she breathed out fractionally harder through her nose. The exercise was becoming amusing.

“I’ve always thought it judicious to carry a flask of water in this sultry season but today I quite clean forgot. Do you have any recommendations for alleviating the discomfort of summer train travel?”

This time, the collapsing meringue rose suddenly, the incongruous plume almost knocked from its perch and, inclining her chin upwards to the right, she resolved to stare out of the window, not before emitting a very audible “hurumpf”.

The game was going nowhere, the sun was unrelenting and gradually, the lady resumed her reading position while Mr. Dubois absently re-scanned the promise of bracing diversions at Skegness.

The abrupt rocking of the compartment as the train crossed rails pulling into York woke them both to their senses. The slim volume had fallen to the floor and for a moment, the lady in black was incapable of making a move. Mr. Dubois stood up and stretched copiously. Alarm spread upon his reluctant companion’s face. He bent down to pick up the temporarily relinquished article.

Slowly their eyes met and, as the train jerked to a halt he adroitly dropped it into her lap.

“Madam”, he said. “You may have denied talking to me, but you cannot deny having slept with me. Good day!”

Story number 9: 'In the Name of Art'

Hello friends,

I hope this gives you some pleasure.

Best wishes,

Philip

In the Name of Art

Nobody liked the graffiti. It had begun as a small daub of unintelligible lettering – an obscure symbol on the last corner house but, over the last year and a half, it had spread like a deadly fungus over every available surface: garden wall, garage door, even the lamp posts. The houses with no front gardens to offer protection were most hard hit; below the ground floor windows, around the front doors, the space between the upper and lower windows – anywhere the spray cans could reach. No-one saw the perpetrators; they came in the dead of night working quickly and silently. Only when their next victim left his house the following morning would the evidence of their nocturnal labours be noticed. Residents complained to each other; various neighbourhood schemes were set up but with little effect. People needed to work, and if they needed to work, they needed to sleep. Nobody was prepared to sit up all night, perhaps for an entire week, on the off-chance of observing the night visitors.

Mrs. Jupp lived at number 57. Her house had been particularly targeted. It was once a pale peach colour with pretty plasterwork details around the windows. It now resembled a painter’s palette. The prolific but untalented artists drawn by the cool canvas of the facade, had competed one with the other until it was a dense confusion of juxtaposed letters and symbols, almost obliterating the door and windows themselves. Mrs. Jupp sympathised with her neighbours and they nodded and sympathised with the jumbled mess that was now the front of her house. “Poor thing. Such a sweet old lady – and her house had always looked so pretty!”

The old dear loved her garden – more of a jungle really. She hadn’t her old energy and she had learned to love the weeds as much as the faithful perennials that jostled for space amongst them. There was one part of the garden, however, that she never went. Years before, surveyors had been and declared that the whole place would have to be dug away and re-earthed – all at great expense; something about an old unregistered tin mine that was conjectured to have existed some two hundred years previous. But nothing had ever been followed up and Mrs. Jupp had ceased worrying about it. But there, between the michaelmas daisies and the rockery was a straight oblong of grass that had curious dents in it. She could just as easily reach the rockery via the rhododendrons so she had no cause to step onto it. It was often wet long after the rest of the garden had dried off from the rain and, if she bent her ear close to the ground, she could hear strange popping sounds. For half the night, Mrs. Jupp sat thinking. Her bedroom light, glowing like a luminous peach behind the drapes, burned well into the early hours. The following morning at around 11.00 o’clock she returned from town with several large plastic bags in each hand. For the remainder of the day she kept quietly to herself.

The side of the house was reached by a wooden gate, which lead directly from the street; a huge tract of sprayable wall which composed the entire right lateral of her home and stretched upwards and long-ways – a perfect heaven for any would-be spray handler with itchy fingers.

A little after midnight she crept out of the kitchen and round to the side of the house and there, right by the wooden gate, she placed her first irresistible treasure: a brand new spray can full of luxurious purple dye. A few steps further an identical canister, only orange; and then, a foot away from the michaelmas daisies, a luminous green variety. It was from here that she had thrown, with certain difficulty, some dozen more – all a glorious rich red, mounted up like a funeral pyre over the strangely uneven tract of grass between the daisies and the rockery.

That night, Mrs. Jupp omitted to bolt the gate. In fact, she left it wide open, giving a perfect view of the virgin canvas and there, in the still of the back bedroom, she sat and waited.

To keep herself busy she picked up her knitting – a navy woollen scarf for an undeserving great nephew. Still, it kept her occupied. Click, clack, click, clack,… the needles kept time with the bedside clock. Click, clack, click, clack… She could wait all night if needs be. And then she heard it; an uninvited foot had knocked over the first trophy. There were footsteps, she had no idea how many. The prey were taking the bait. She let go her knitting and peeped just above the sill. There must have been at least half a dozen of them – the whole gang may be. One of them had spotted the final prize. There was no order, no caution. Ah, foolish youth. The daisies were crushed underfoot as eight pairs of legs ran thundering onto the forbidden rectangle. What nocturnal scribe would not have jumped for joy at such a find? – and with the prospect of two hundred square feet of free expression into the bargain.

There were no cries, no shouts, no commotion at all. As silently as they came, they made their final exit. Mrs. Jupp heard a short, low rumble. The house shuddered very slightly and a huge cloud of dust rose up and began drifting over the garden wall. She made her way slowly downstairs and stepped onto the gravel path. The rockery had all but disappeared. A couple of pieces of stone were sticking up through the soft earth and the rhododendron was leaning perilously to one side. The michaelmas daisies would have to be sorted, quite hopeless they were. But that could wait until morning.

During the following few months the street began to put on a fresh face. It was imperceptible at first; a lick of paint here and a lick of paint there. Slowly it began to assume its old charm as the awakening house owners took pride once more in their homes; none so much as dear Mrs. Jupp. There was even a whip round to help her. Her little house had been so disfigured.

“Not peach this time I feel” she was heard to say.

“Something a little bolder… why not a nice bright red? … and, by the way, I’d be terribly grateful if someone could lend a hand with the garden, it’s really needing a good going over?”