THE PRINCE - a 100 word story

THE PRINCE

The neighbourhood was in uproar and Petey watched from the garden, thrilled by the blue flashing lights. Eventually his mum called him inside for tea. “Your friend Lucy’s missing.”

 Petey ate a chip. “Mum – how long is a hundred years?”

“A very long time, darling.”

“More than one ordinary sleep?”

“A lot more – why?”

“Because Lucy’s sleeping for a hundred years.”

His mum sat down with a thump. “Petey – do you know where she is?”

Petey waved his fork nonchalantly. “Course I do – I’ve got to chop through the hedge and kiss her.” He pulled a face. “I’ll go after tea.”

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Thanks as always to https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/ for the photo that prompted this story. I almost wrote one about my Pa, whom the scent of box hedges always brings to mind, so here is one of my favourite photos of him, taken many years ago.

TELL ME A STORY, PA

  “TELL ME A STORY” 

I remember asking my father that. I wish I could also remember the stories he made up for me and my brother, but they are lost in the mists of  TIME. One legacy I do have though - he passed on to me his vivid imagination.

Here he is - my PA x

Perhaps earliest man sat in his cave telling stories and the cave paintings we see are simply illustrations? I wonder if they finished their TALES by saying, “THE END”?

At the start of Part 3 of Helter-Skelter I tell the story of Albie at TRAINING CAMP, learning to drive an Army TRUCK, and of what happens when his old enemy from his schooldays TURNS UP in the same regiment.
 Strange as it may seems, records are reticent about the kinds of shennanigans soldiers in training indulged in, but with some input from the OH about his National Service my imagination has had free rein.

  

TEIDE is the TALLEST mountain in the Canary Islands and the Spanish Peninsula. It measures 3718 metres which is over two miles. I know at least two people who joined the “Mile High Club” without leaving the ground, though where they found the energy is a mystery, because the air is very thin.
It can also be very cold – I have been up there in the snow – but there are barbecue areas where local people go all year round. 

You can take a cable car to the top when it’s not too windy, and if you get a permit in advance you can climb the final 200 metres to breathe the sulphurous fumes. Mount Teide might be dormant but it’s not dead.

TREES – The jacarandas flowered in our village last week just in TIME for your photographic TREAT of the day.

PA'S LEGACY

You might just be able to distinguish the dog-collar in this photo if you look hard enough. It was probably taken on a Sunday and Pa still hadn't changed into mufti to do the gardening.
The only one missing from this family portrait is one brother - perhaps he was away at Uni or wielding the camera, though Pa was quite nifty at setting a timer and nipping round to get into the picture.
Pa didn't leave us any money - he had none to leave - but his legacy to me was a love of words. When I was at college I got a letter every week. Mum's were short and sweet and handwritten - you could sense her thinking "What else can I tell Lizzie now?" but Pa's were thumped out on his old upright typewriter and his personality lifted from the page to envelop me in thoughts of home. The letter was always single-spaced on one side of a sheet of foolscap - sometimes two, if I was lucky - while on the reverse were his old sermons. Pa never threw paper away if it could be re-used.
   I even read those sermons  because he knew how to string words together and they were never boring,, though the sheets he had recycled were seldom consecutive - and the force with which he had bashed the typewriter keys was evident in the way the full stops broke clear through to the other side. He used to do the same with the Gestetner sheets for the Parish Magazine.
   The Rectory shelves were full of books and if I asked what a word meant we would look it up together in the "Enc Brit". Did you have a set of those Encyclopaedia Brittannica? Gold tooled red binding on a set of about 24 books, and we even had a special bookcase to go with them. They must have cost a fortune, no doubt on the "Never-never" but we got our money's worth out of them. I've even written them into a book of my own!, Once Id found a word and its meaning, Pa would explain how it was derived from the Latin or Greek or Hebrew. I did only a term on Latin but I can still use what Pa taught me to understand a new word.

And the reason for all this retrospection is simple - yesterday was his birthday. He was born in 1905 and he lived to be 90.
Happy Birthday PA. I love you.

PS. I still wander round a stationery shop like an addict after a fix, and I have paper that's decades old waiting to be used. He'd be proud of me.

ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA

NO!! They can't get rid of it!
My childhood was spent looking up any question Pa couldn't answer in one of those huge books.
Pa bought the set - no doubt on the never-never - with a made-to-measure bookcase. Anything we (or he) wanted to know we would look up in the Enc. Brit. Yes, it was so much part of our lives that it had a nickname in our house. You could sit with a lovely red volume on your lap and leaf through, coming across all kinds of information you didn't know you wanted until you saw it.
I know the internet is quicker, but Google can't hope to match the Enc. Brit..