Oddities

 
I’d seen them before, a twosome usually but sometimes with an addition, walking down the streets of our small town. Strange people I thought, certain too that other normal people would think the same. (I can really be very arrogant in my thoughts at times! Just as well others can’t read them.)

Anyway, the most outstanding of these two was the man. Tall, with a shaven head and two small piercing round eyes looking out from a most pugnacious face. No shirt, or jacket, even on the coldest of days; just a singlet showing off his somewhat skinny chest, narrow hips and long thin legs with great lace-up boots on his feet. His bulk seemed to increase too as he drew nearer. I could feel the animosity that came with him as he approached me. He bristled with it; ominously. And his look, when his eyes met mine, was quite belligerent. The message his look conveyed to me was, Ugh! You pathetic looking wimp. I should squash you with my boot, and watch it, ‘cos I just might!

I would sometimes proffer a timid greeting, given in a casual light-hearted way, in an attempt to inculcate his favour, if there was any favour to incul if you get my drift. Sometimes he answered! Fiercely, with eyebrows furrowed and knit tightly together looking down on me, surprised as if expecting a sudden attack from a pathetic looking wimp who had the audacity to address him. But I could never catch what it was he said as it was forced through clenched teeth. Perhaps it was just as well.

Sometimes I was spared the effort of a greeting as he was busy throwing words over his shoulder at the slight form of femininity trudging behind him. At times I thought he might have been completely stoned. But here’s the thing: he was the same person I had seen as a schoolboy, just a few years’ ago during my years as a teacher. There was a strangeness about him even then, when, despite being dressed as other schoolboys in his uniform he was never lost in the crowd. Something indefinable in his walk, his look, the way he held himself, together with a strange aloofness (bordering on the cloud-nine variety) suggested to me – vaguely – that something was out of kilter somewhere.

How easily I, at times, have thus appraised my fellow men. I wouldn’t say I judged them; more that I was able to assess or sum a person up fairly quickly. Of course I’ve also been wrong at times, and I certainly wasn’t sure in this case.

I saw this man again another time fairly recently, with the slight form of femininity. This time though it was different. This time they walked together, side by side, and he held her hand. And this time, in his other hand, he held a tiny bundle close against his chest. His look was still fierce but it was the fierceness of a man who has fathered a child. And should anyone have dared to challenge him about the baby being his I do believe his very look would have turned them to stone…

For me – and I’m sorry to have to say this, but – for me, I felt something was wrong. The picture just didn’t ring true. His eyes still lacked something; something that I would describe as the light and warmth of true fatherhood. Both of these qualities were missing, and I must confess my heart froze slightly with that realisation. Would what I thought of him as a person be passed on to the child? Wasn’t the pride I saw only there for himself? Was he really a father? Or had he simply supplied the male sperm that fertilised the egg?

Well, down the street they went. A brief and moving picture of three human souls that passed me on the street that day. Of their background, heritage and future fortune, I knew nothing, but I have thought much since then of the small bundle in that man’s arms. What of its life? Would the mother be a mother; the father a father? Would the child experience all that a human father may bestow – of warmth, love and care?

The strange man was there on the street again today, walking with another man (who appeared to be quite normal) and chatting as they walked. And she, the slight form of femininity, was back a pace or two as they walked before. No babe I saw, and I felt concerned by that. As I was about to turn away from the scene, still wondering, my eyes saw that she had stopped, head down, looking at her feet, while the two men walked on a little way. And do you know…the strange man noticed she was not following and he stopped too. Then pausing only a moment, he walked back to her and, placing his arm around her shoulders quite gently it seemed to me, leaned forward and spoke softly to her. They held each other briefly, before holding hands and joining the other, and they continued down the street.

It was then I thought this: could it be that I am the odd one out?

Dennis Crompton © 1995

A surprising reversal

We brought nothing into this world and it is certain that we shall carry nothing out of it. However, the bit in between immerses us in many variations. I once watched a plain piece of metal being silver-plated. The process didn’t seem to take long. The piece of metal was lowered into a tank. I saw a few bubbles rise to the surface and when the piece was lifted out it was gleaming with a thin silvery coating. We could liken various stages of life to that kind of process.

In my collection of discarded books from local libraries I have a New Zealand Almanac in which I found several pages of obituaries. For one month there was mention of:

• a chief electoral officer;
• an air vice marshall;
• a chairman of  New Zealand  company;
• a leading horse breeder;
• a paramount (Maori) chief;
• and three others, including a former pilot, a recipient of a heart transplant, and the youngest at 2 1/2 months old was the unsuccessful recipient of a liver transplant.

Those and the rest of the obituaries were for people considered to be of some significance, the kind you’d expect to be there in the Almanac. Because I’m stimulated by thinking outside the square, I wondered then who ought to have been in those pages but were not. For instance, there’s a great deal of hype and ballyhoo surrounding sport today. Fifteen make up a rugby team yet it’s the one who scores the try or kicks the conversion who gets the most recognition. It’s the same in most team sports of course. Everyone can’t be mentioned but surely there could be a more balanced appraisal?

The same applies in the wider field of life. I smile when I recall something said one day by the headmaster of the school I attended from the age of 10. It was winter, the cold was biting into our lightly clad bodies as we were lining up to get into the classroom where it would be warmer. As usual, muscle power or the threat of its use, saw the bigger lads in the front. The headmaster looked at us, his long thin nose red from the cold, sporting a small but distinct dew-drop. “Quiet everyone,” he called. And quiet there was. The boys at the front, now with a perceptible forward lean, poised on their toes ready for their motion into the classroom. But then the headmaster said, “Everyone turn around. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Now, the boy at the back move first and lead the way around into the classroom, and the rest follow him.”

Oh, with what childish delight we, at the back, marched past those bigger lads. When we were settled into the classroom, the headmaster looked at us and said, “If you care to read St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 19, verse 30, you’ll find the origin of the rule used outside today.” Hes smile was only just outdone by the lads who’d marched past the bigger lads. From that time on, the headmaster kept us guessing as to what he’d come up with next as regards the order of things. It stimulated our thinking no end, and in doing so, he won my admiration and allegiance.

He was an ordinary man. The kind, I like to think, who when it came time for him to leave the stage of life, would have heard the words, “The last shall be first, come on in!” And I reckon that all manner of ordinary people would be close behind him.

Dennis Crompton © 1999

Places

In that small cottage over there,

I first saw the light of day.

 *

Up that dark and cobbled street,

awful demons I did meet.

 *

In that schoolyard I met Alfred;

he could pee two inches higher.

 *

In that schoolroom I did learn

the wonders of the written word.

 *

In this ear did a schoolgirl whisper:

come closer, love, and let me kiss you.

 *

My sister gave me in that house there

a delicious slice of her homemade bread.

 *

In that village house I knelt beside

the bedside of a coffined child.

 *

In that air raid shelter I did hide

from enemy bombers in the night.

 *

In this street I once did see

a big red bus run near over me.

 *

From Glasgow city I sailed away,

great expectations filled my day.

 *

Down that road I walked on air,

softly whispering my love for her.

 *

In that ward a miracle I did see;

my first daughter born to me.

 *

So many places I have seen,

wandering, adventurous, lucky me.

 *

Dennis Crompton © 1995

(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)

Preston: school and prison

The Wesleyan Methodist School in St Mary's Street was the school I attended when we left Longridge to live in Preston around 1942. Across from the school was a small door set in very high brick wall that was almost a complete square. Inside was the Preston prison, complete with treadmill, for the prisoners to exercise on.

During World War II, on a siren warning of possible enemy action, all the pupils and staff from the school walked across the road, through the small door to the prison and into the air-raid shelters dug into the prison grounds. We never had to use them in the event of real enemy action but we did practice getting to them a few times.

As an older man, I used to shock some people by saying (with a serious look on my face), that I had to confess to a lie I had told when I joined the British Army and then the Royal New Zealand Air Force: that I had never been to prison ... then told them the above.

Dennis Crompton © 2013
(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)

I see...

Written whilst looking outside my office window, Studholme Street, Morrinsville, New Zealand.

* 

The road outside my window

now teems with every form of life …

above, all sight of feathered flight is lost

to those set on an intercontinental course …

 *

Close by I see the past in an old fence post,

last remnant of the farmhouse here that was,

beneath my feet the earth, rich and dark

retains whatever drama was played out here

a hundred or more years before …

 *

Next door, pupils arrive from school eager

for another supplementary education session …

seated at keyboard, their fingers,

brain directed, computing information

adding an extra dimension to their day’s learning.

 *

What formula will they perhaps discover …

that twenty years on will set another kind of course?

No matter; they have youth’s potential and motivation

to adventure with a growing, more cosmopolitan

worldwide barrier breaking population …

on the internet I see …

*

Our human senses interface,

surface skimming almost instinctively …

sometimes, provoked by mood or other stimuli

more deeply comprehending a new insight.

 *

Dennis Crompton © 1999

(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)

With these eyes I have seen

I have seen with these eyes

things to make me wonder, weep or cry;

been lifted up and cast down too

by the kaleidoscopic gamut

of happenings around.

*

Seen troops of chattering children

free from classrooms’ confining walls,

learning as they strolled hand in hand

along widening enlightening roads.

*

Frail elderlies too, sedate, composed

on their daily walk to town…when,

a sudden swirl of wheeling birds

brings them joy in the sunny air.

*

From trailer hitched to back of truck

stare two soft eyes, lovely and brown

a patient cow from out of town…

now comes a fat and friendly Labrador,

his coat a glossy black

lightly trots his sniffing round

pink tongue peeps from smiling mouth.

*

Be careful now!…he’s on the road,

inspecting something lying there;

hedgehog squashed, exposed, obscene

too late on snail patrol he’d seen

oncoming vehicle lights surprised

and just as suddenly, he died.

*

Here comes a silent, sad-faced gentleman

hurting deeply at employment lost;

services no longer required; sorry,

must lay you off, says his younger efficient boss.

*

There is beauty, wonder, sadness, love…

yes, all these things for me are free.

I can select, absorb, ignore or shut out,

the choice is mine, you see…

from my store of mind-pictures

sometimes deep emotions stir,

make me one with all mankind…

silent at night or away on my own

the call me from the library of my mind.

*

Then warmed or weeping, bless the thought:

‘These things I’ve seen I can share with you’.

*

Dennis Crompton © 1995

(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)

Nymphs, indeed!

When you’re young, moving from one district to another has a certain excitement about it. My seventh birthday had come and gone some three or so months past, and while I did enjoy the change in surroundings in the street where we went to live, starting at a new school was another story.

It was a cold blustery winter’s day in 1988 when I stood again on the pavement opposite the school. The school still stands three-quarters of the way up Berry Lane in a village called Londgridge, seven miles from the industrial town of Preston, Lancashire. It still looked the same as it had 50 years ago; an impressive building of stone, with an air of strength and permanence about it. My camera captured it, I’m pleased to say, as progress had already obliterated too many other scenes from my past to lose this one too.

For once, though, I was disappointed that the doors were closed; they never had been closed when I was a schoolboy there. The classrooms, I remembered, were large with high ceilings and dark, varnished woodwork adding a somewhat sombre feeling to my first days there. Sea shells, coloured and smooth, were placed before me to perform some simple calculation, which I couldn’t figure out how to start, and which grew more hateful the more confused I became that day. Somehow I survived; we do, don’t we? The elasticity that comes with youth thankfully enables us to ride these daily ups and downs of life, and we move on.

Some weeks before I moved to the ‘big’ school next door, Miss Cranford the Head Mistress, poor soul, had an idea which involved our class in particular. It was around that time that pupils in Manchester a few miles away from us became popular for their rendering of a song called: ‘Nymphs and shepherds’. I’d never heard of nymphs before that time, had you? Despite what follows, I still enjoy hearing children sing that song, which is quite amazing really, when you consider what I have to tell you.

It was like this you see: Miss Cranford began to appear in our classrooms more often than previously and seemed anxious to improve the way we spoke. It was at this point that she encountered the first barrier to her scheme. A tall elegant woman, I felt she had a point, and listened carefully to what she had to say, trying hard to talk nicely with disastrous results. The first time I spoke using ‘The Cranford Improved Speaking Approach’, or CISA for short, my friends dissolved in laughter and wanted to hear more. At first it was a bit of fun but later as I continued my efforts they began to shun and ignore me, saying that I was becoming too ‘stuck up’ and ‘talking too posh’ to mix with them and to:

‘Tek t’ plum out of me gob and talk reet’.

It became too much when they mentioned Coventry. I didn’t want to be sent there, where-ever it was.
I guess pupils in other schools discovered the folly of the CISA method and joined all the others in silent and sullen action; Miss Cranford’s efforts were resisted, bringing a temporary lull in the engagement. I say temporary, for Miss Cranford was made of sterner stuff and was merely taking time off to marshal her resources. As it turned out, she would need them, every last one of them, bless her.

We had a few days to recuperate and our vocal chords appreciated the rest. The tension eased, laughter was heard again and smiles appeared on children’s faces… well, where else would they appear? Then Miss Cranford returned, with a smile that was not really a smile on her face, and I sensed the inevitable clash of minds. In a way I felt sorry for her, she meant well and there was no doubt that many of us would have benefitted greatly from learning to speak clearly and more distinctly. (As a matter of fact I did so myself, and am grateful for it.)

Now we come to the second barrier. Our Miss Cranford had an ulterior motive; if we could learn to speak more clearly we might just possible learn to sing also, with the same clear, pristine quality as the school children from Manchester. Those children, innocent thought they might have been, have more to answer for than they ever realised. I wonder how many other schools throughout the land were being put through the same tortuous, mind-bending, voice-straining, third-degree session as we were? Day after day, the words of ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’ were pinned up at the front of the class for us to follow.

“Nymphs and Shepherds come away,

In the Groves let's sport and play,

For this, this is Flora’s Holy day.

Sacred to ease and happy Love,

to Dancing, to Musick, and to Poetry:

Your Flocks may now securely rove,

whilst you express your Jollity.”

(Lyrics by Thomas Shadwell, music by Henry Purcell)

A teacher, pressed into service, sat hunched over the piano keys; the conductor, who else but Miss Cranford, stepped into the arena, ruler gripped tightly in her fist, the smile that wasn’t a smile hovering around the corners of her tightly-pressed lips. Gradually the conditioning process took over.

We would rise on signal, hardly a foot daring to shuffle, desk to creak or cough to even threaten the silence of that dreaded moment when her hand would come down for the first note of yet another encounter.

We sang, oh how we sang for you Miss Cranford, like angels attempting to soar to the same majestic heights as those blasted kids from Manchester. Blood would have been shed in large quantities had we ever met them. ‘Let’s sport and play’ went the words of the song, sport and play indeed; and surely ‘Flora’ could have had her holiday without all that damned fuss! And who was she anyway? It was fortunate that no pupil from our school was named Flora, I can tell you.

As time went on, we played merry havoc with those words in the playground, creating our own version. Had it been possible for Thomas Shadwell to have heard what we did to those verses he had hatched from his creative mind, he would no doubt have wished he’d written something quite different, thus denying us the opportunity to be somewhat creative ourselves. Miss Cranford went distinctly red in the face during those last few sessions and it crossed my mind that perhaps she heard our revised version and was trying desperately to block it from her mind.

The intense tuition took its toll; Miss Cranford’s hair lost its sheen; her elegant form slumped around the middle and the smile-that-wasn’t resembled more of a grimace as the last session ended. One had to admire the manner in which she left the classroom that day; maybe she’d had a snifter or two of some drink, liberally laced with a single lady’s pick-me-up before making that last supreme effort to draw from our class the clear, pure, dulcet tones she had so set her heart on.

Never mind, Miss Cranford, you did your best, and as I said earlier, I still enjoy Nymphs and Shepherds as sung by those delightful children from Manchester. I have the record you see and can play it whenever I wish. Sometimes when the mood takes me, when I’m feeling a bit naughty like, I put the record on and just as those smarty kids reach the first note they are to sing, I switch if off and have a damned good, throat-clearing cough and laugh, both together. Nymphs, indeed!

Dennis Crompton © 1996
(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)

Distant flavours

Michael, the quiet and reserved sixth-former at college was tolerated by the boys, being a worthy goal-keeper in their soccer team. Girls saw him differently, rating him tops in good looks and charm and dreaming of him as most likely to succeed as donor father to their as yet only dreamed of children. Despite their best efforts, none succeeded in gaining his attention and were dismissed with a fleeting smile. Visible but unattainable, Michael with the aura of a living Oscar, remained a delectable but distant figure. By the middle of term two sights were lowered, any male, ready, able and willing was seen as desirable. Hasty perhaps, as feminine intuition may or may not have let them down.

A movement, quivering for some time in Michael’s most secret place, began a gradual agitation to volcano status. Despite his best efforts, even with his mind in neutral, his body would take over, embarrassing him when in public, frequently and without warning, the location of its trigger to gain control eluded him.

However, at other times delightfully suggestive femininity surrounding him brought a higher impetus to play. Then, as if a door had opened in his mind, sonnets in homage to their loveliness would flow from his pen, sensuous and beautiful and waiting to be shared.

Until Kumiko arrived, softening the blue of his heaven and all other hues as well. Divided attention saw him replaced as goal-keeper but he’d gained a partner for the mid-term ball. Michael’s gift to her, discovered and purchased via the internet, came from Kumiko’s own country, Japan.

She took a moment to use it and there on the dance-floor they shared their first taste of tengokuno kutizuke, a lipstick rightly named ‘the kiss of heaven’.

And I’m assured that sharing such distant flavours is just divine.

 

Dennis Crompton © 2000

(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)