Of Woe, Wonder and Whimsy , livre ebook

Austin Macauley Publishers - E. Ceit D.

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

101 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Thirteen tales as they were told to me on wild, wet and windy nights, throughout one raw winter not so very long ago. I was compelled to write them down and have duly done so loyally and without undue exaggeration towards time and place. Above all, the characters within these pages lived, and many still do, in a rapidly changing landscape.These tales blossomed in and around the once-isolated villages of Ripponden and Rishworth, of Calderdale, West Yorkshire. But on looking at them, they might well have sprung to life almost anywhere.So make of them what you will. For a tale is but a tale after all, and needn't be believed. It is up to you, the reader, to decide!

Sujets

Short story

Informations

Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers
Date de parution	28 février 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781528955799
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Of Woe, Wonder and Whimsy
D. E. Ceit
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-02-28
Of Woe, Wonder and Whimsy About The Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgements The Bowling Green! (Stewart Utterthwaite!) Savage Revenge! (The Wind!) Pillars of Sand! (Fred Walker!) Spring! (The Hawthorn!) The Snowflake! (Winter!) Summer! (A Favourite Place!) Stony Lane! (Molly!) Sticky Fingers! (Norbert Ramage!) Dust to Dust! (Maggie Habergam!) The Weights of Space! (‘Great Man’s Head Hill’!) And Hopes Sprang External! (The 531!) The Hillbeast! (Stewart Utterthwaite Again!) That Gap Before the Bridge! (Autumn!)
About The Author
Ex-teacher, university sports officer and tour guide, who took to writing when a teenager and who then got ambushed by marriage, divorce and life in general before deciding to write a miscellaneous collection of short stories.
Dedication
To Cathie Louise
Copyright Information ©
D. E. Ceit (2020)
The right of D. E. Ceit to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788786355 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528955799 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Austin Macaulay Publishers for their help with this book.
The Bowling Green! (Stewart Utterthwaite!)
Not long after he’d sat down upon the bench by the Bowling Green, and just as his mind was beginning to wander away upon the gentle summer breeze, the pretty little dragonfly (vivid red and green iridescence) landed upon his outstretched leg and perched delicately, almost acrobatically, on the material of his faded khaki shorts flexing its fragile lace-like wings. The ‘ruddy darter’ that now rested serenely upon his leg was, to all intents and purposes, her mischievous familiar, its vivid red and green little body triggering all the hapless memories inside his head. And before he could object, before he was able to eject her memory from within his perplexed mind, her ghost ambushed him, grabbing him by the scruff of his neck and thrusting him back into the playground of his past. His heart suddenly skipped a beat and he stifled and swallowed a rising sob as his brain was switched back to the past. It was as if the insect had turned a light on inside his dusty and cobwebby head. And as his thoughts hurdled back the many years past, he knew that he was powerless to stop them doing so. He had to go with the flow now. He couldn’t resist. It was futile to even try!
“What a load of codswallop! What a load of old rubbish! Twaddle! What a complete waste of time, and more importantly, precious money!”
She stopped him (for they were walking up the old ‘Packhorse’ Road towards ‘The Fleece Inn’) in his tracks and looked earnestly, deploringly, into his eyes, his clown-like smile beamed from ear to ear.
“Stewart, listen to me, there are millions, maybe billions even, of starving people out there in the world right now. Men, women and children, what about them? And what about what’s going on in Vietnam, is that right? How do you square all that imperialist aggression with your precious, glorious ‘space race’, your silly little man on the moon, you, you, you capitalist pig!”
Now whenever Maggie derided him and called him names, he couldn’t help himself but laugh back at her, which in turn was like pouring petrol onto an already flaming blaze. But if the truth be known, neither of them were anything like politically aware in a decade that had been a veritable hotbed of political issues for the youth of the world. They were in fact just a couple of struggling, clueless teenagers. Small and ineffectual cogs in a massive machine of that was the radical youthfulness of the 1960’s. Naïve little satellites in a topsy-turvy universe that bubbled and spat trouble like a witch’s cauldron.
By the late summer of 1970, they were both nineteen and, on the face of it, nothing appeared to have changed much. Man was now firmly established on the surface of the moon. President Kennedy’s prophecy had proved correct and he’d won hands down so-to-speak. His eternal flame was assured forever. But then nothing really followed, and the ‘Apollo’ programme soon fizzled out in rather less glory than when it had commenced a few years earlier. The ‘Beatles’ had split up and gone their separate ways, and all that remained of the 60’s were the distant echoes that were themselves fast becoming the past, as ‘glam-rock’ reared its ugly and glitzy head. The 1960’s were indeed very much over and so was the flower power, and yet the misery, that was Vietnam, rumbled on regardless for a few more years yet.
Stewart, like his father, began drifting from job to job: from mill to farm and from farm to mill and back again. Whatever he found himself doing he was never very settled; he couldn’t quite find a suitable niche for himself. His itchy feet always took him to some other place but never to somewhere that he felt able, or more importantly, comfortable enough to put his roots down. He began to mistrust many of those around him and in reality he became well and truly a ‘loner’. But as long as he had enough money in his pocket for his beer, tobacco and eventually, his rent, nothing really mattered anymore and he stayed exactly the same.
Maggie Habergam’s dreams, ambitions and great expectations also resulted in nothing. All became grey, dull and decidedly sodden with self-pity, and it all became a bit of a damp squib, and what’s more she knew it! She was painfully aware that she had sold herself short, but felt that there was really nothing that she could actually do about it. But behind the ‘grin and bearing’ of it all her dark fears and realisations were beginning to take a definite shape now, and she knew that sooner or later she’d have to confront and face them. But not just yet as she has one last hurdle to surmount and that would be the big ultimate test for her. But in the meantime, she carried on with her humdrum way of life with its everyday routine – just like everyone else. She didn’t go to join V.S.O, she didn’t even send for an application form, for the thought of even the slightest inconvenience and discomfort in foreign climes absolutely appalled her. The awful food. The disgusting sanitary conditions. And all those nasty creepy-crawlies didn’t even bare thinking about, let alone actually having to face them for real on a daily basis. In her fickle heart she knew that she liked her steaming hot baths and crisp clean bed sheets far too much, not to mention her clean ‘Marks and Spencer’ underwear. Moreover, her other great desire, the farmed ‘Time For Tea’ café that she had dreamt up in her mind, and would one day eventually own as her own, became nothing more than a childish whim, a silly fantasy, and resulted only in her inner embarrassment whenever she happened to think about it, which in actually fact was hardly ever nowadays. Whenever he was with her, Stewart could sense her discomfort so, very sensibly, kept his mouth shut and never brought it up again in passing conversation. In the end, she ended up getting a job in the offices at ‘Ripponden and District’ motor carriers and trained to be (of all things) a junior typist! She really didn’t like it very much and found her tasks monotonous, but the people she worked with were kind to her and were good fun when they went out to the pub after work on a Friday afternoon. And she especially liked the colour of the blue and cream lorries and vans that she saw in the works yard beyond her office window. Very smart indeed. She also carried on living at home on the ‘Oldham Road’ so her work was in easy walking distance and meant that she had no travelling expenses to fork out for. And this in turn meant that she was able to save money on regular weekly basis, something that was completely alien to Stewart’s way of thinking. Therefore, her life was pleasingly tolerable for the time being, although her ‘bogey-man’ was never too far away from her waking and sleeping thoughts now.
It was in the heat of the day, late on in the summer, when they once more (and for the last time for a very long time) shared each other’s company. Until late that August they had hardly seen anything at all of each other throughout the whole of that summer. Indeed, they had only met in passing where they’d exchange the obligatory ‘how are you doing?’ and ‘what have you been up to?’ As well as all the usual mundane questions related to their places of work. But during that late August month Stewart received a letter which impressed his mother to no end, from Maggie asking him to meet her on the old Packhorse Bridge that spanned the River Ryburn at the bottom of the ‘Priest Lane’. She gave a specific day and a time when they should meet, and she further stipulated that if she wasn’t there by such and such a time, he wasn’t to wait a minute longer but to get himself off and that she’d be in touch. The day came. It was a Friday and he found himself on the old bridge looking down into the fast-flowing water for brown trout and was fascinated by the ‘dippers’ diving into the water searching for their food amongst the stones and rocks, walking upright on their little legs. He was mesmerised by two in particular dipper birds that flew with a flick of white back and forth up a culverted outpouring that ran along under St Bartholomew’s grave yard. He glanced at his