Seven Stages

To four people who are at stages one and two in their lives

Alexander, Annabelle, Jovie and Matilda

FOREWORD

We live our lives through stories.  We hear them from an early age.  We probably begin telling them to ourselves before we can speak.  When we can, we start reading them and then we start telling them to others.  We see them unfold in front of our eyes, because stories are our lives.

Some stories are based on truth while others are made up.  Some are funny, some sad.  Some stories finish too soon and others are far too long. Some stories say the same things over and over again and others are unique.  Stories can be easy to read or a closed book.

Whatever the story, most people have a tale to tell. And some of us try to write these stories down for others to read. This anthology contains some such stories. 

The writers of this book didn’t feel that they had a story of their own to tell so they decided to write about other people’s stories.  People who are worth writing about.

So, the writers sat in their chairs searching for stories. Inspiration and notes became life sentences. Days came and went. They grew older as they drifted in and out of the pasts, presents and futures of others. The short and long roads taken and not taken. 

And, stage by stage, the stories were conceived at the top of a series of blank pages. 

Ian Meacheam & Mark Peckett

CONTENTS

The Beast Of The Earth Mark Peckett

Sans Teeth Ian Meacheam 6

Fallen Angels Ian Meacheam

Stand Up Mark Peckett

Museum Pieces Ian Meacheam

God Knows Ian Meacheam

Mid-Death Crisis Mark Peckett

Better Late Than Never Ian Meacheam

Catch-67 Ian Meacheam

A Watch In The Night Mark Peckett

Clutter Ian Meacheam

Arthur And Fitz Ian Meacheam

The Spy Who Mark Peckett

A Predictable Christmas Movie Ian Meacheam

Hilary Ian Meacheam

Father And Son Mark Peckett

Memories Of Danny Ian Meacheam

Seven Wastes Of Time Ian Meacheam

His Father’s Fool Mark Peckett

The Staircase Ian Meacheam

Stages Ian Meacheam

A Piece Of Green Land Mark Peckett

Postcard From James Kirkup Ian Meacheam

The Rising Sea Mark Peckett

Natural Selection Box Ian Meacheam

A Proper Upbringing Mark Peckett

Tea And A Scone Ian Meacheam

The Seventh Age Mark Peckett

I Grow Old Ian Meacheam

THE BEAST OF THE EARTH

Mark Peckett

I can’t say now with any certainty if this really happened or if it was a dream and with every passing year the memory grows more unreliable.  Why do I recall it as if I was watching a film?  Who are the other children with me there?  I cannot recollect a single name, how many boys or girls, or any other event that brought us all together again.

In those days, we would go out after breakfast with a plastic flask of weak orange squash and a jam sandwich in an old gas mask satchel and range far and wide, coming home only when it grew dark or we became tired or hungry – or so we tell everyone now, but my recollection is of being given firm instructions to be home for dinner and tea, although how we marked the passage of time, like so much in this story, I have no idea. 

To give this story some context, we were all the children of masters at a lesser public school, although none of us was educated there; it was, after all, only a minor public school and did not pay its staff enough to afford its fees.  Most of us went to the local village school, and then, after the eleven plus, we caught the bus to the grammar school.  So it wasn’t our school and we had nothing to do with the boys, but it was our playground.  I have since taken my wife back with me in a faltering attempt to make sense of my muddled recollection, but the house I had shared with my parents and my brother had converted into accommodation for sixth form girls since the school went co-ed back in the nineteen eighties.  I thought that going back might bring back some the names of other teachers and their children, but it did not.  The only thing I learned was how small things are when you go back – the lofty trees I had climbed up and the high walls I had jumped down from as a boy were hardly any height at all.  We were shown round the campus by the Headmaster, who had been a young teacher there at the same time as my father and he asked after him.  I told him he had finished his career as a university lecturer and died unexpectedly several years ago.  He told me he had had fond memories of him, and took us to lunch in The Refectory, and then we went home.  For whatever reason, I did not take my wife to see The Lane, nor did I tell her this story. 

Anyway, we must all have been playing at something.  It was usually War.  We fought a thousand battles and died a thousand times in a thousand different ways: machine-gunned, blown up or bayoneted.  Then, at some point we ended up in The Lane, which was actually not a lane at all, but a grass track leading to a gate and a field beyond. 

So there we were, at The Lane.  Why did we start digging?  There was no reason then, and, even now, I can’t come up with an adequate explanation why a group of children, all less than ten years of age, should start digging with sticks and stones.  At least, that is how I assume we dug.  Had we used our hands, surely a memory of dirt under the finger nails would remain clear?  Although, even now, I have a dislike of dirty hands, so is it possible that I simply stood back and watched while the others dug?  Did someone invent a new game?  In my experience, when you see a group of kids like that together, one of them is older, usually a girl of about ten who alternately mothers and torments them.

Perhaps there was a girl like that with us.  Perhaps it was her idea that we start digging.  Did she tell us a story?  Were we caught up in the fantasy of a girl on the cusp of puberty?  For whatever reason, we started to dig, and I have no idea how long we scraped and scratched at the ground.  Back then time was elastic and hour could last a minute and a minute could seem like an hour, but, in my memory, the whole thing now assumes the quality of a poorly-shot film recorded on faulty equipment.  It jumps and the camera angle shifts, but there is no sound.  I can’t hear an excited cry, or a name spoken or an order given.  It is strange.

All of my strongest memories of my childhood days are evoked by smells – the sweet scent of newly-mown grass floating in through a classroom window on a hot summer’s day, the old lady perfume of boiled cabbage that lingered in my grandparents’ house, the military smell of canvas from our two-week camping holidays – but of this episode, there is nothing.  Shouldn’t it reek in my memory of wet earth, crushed grass and dog shit?

Now, in my mind’s eye, I am looking over the shoulders of the children who are peering into the hole.  I have the strangest sense of standing there as an adult and a child at the same time.  The adult sees a hole that is not very big, because it couldn’t be, but to the child it is as big and chilling as a grave.  The earth is dark and sweating, and smooth shiny stones peep out of the sides like the eyes of goblins waiting to drag us underground; half a worm coils in its death throes.  And at the bottom, smeared with mud, we can both see a piece of rough wood that I would now call deal or pitch pine and back then I thought of as the kind rabbit hutches and sheds were built of.  It is roughly the size of paperback book and in the middle of it a hole has been punched.  Poking through, we can clearly see fur, bright with notes of ginger and black and white in it.  My first thought, as an adult and a boy, is that it is a cat.

With the benefit of hindsight, my thoughts now are, why would anyone bury a cat there, in a ditch, near a hedge, in a lane?  If it was beloved pet, it would be buried in a back garden, under a rose bush.  If it wasn’t, then why was it buried at all, instead of rotting on a patch of waste ground somewhere.  Whatever the reason, it certainly wasn’t alive. But perhaps it wasn’t a dead cat at all.  Logic dictates it should have smelled and I have already told you that there was no smell evoking the memory.  Unless there was the faintest whiff of naphthalene.

Perhaps it was a fur coat, stolen and buried to be returned to and collected at a later date.  Again, that makes no sense, but it’s as good a story as any, unless you can come up with a better one.  Typically, that’s the one I think  we settled on as children.  It was buried treasure, a big box full of money and furs and jewels that a robber had hidden.

Clearly we couldn’t dig it out with what we had, so the plan was made.  We would return after dinner (in those days we had dinner in the middle of the day, before we all became members of the upper middle class) with tools we had stolen from our fathers’ sheds and unearth our treasure.  Once again, in retrospect, this makes no sense.  How did we know what time it was?  Certainly it was after breakfast and before dinner, but other than that, we had no idea.  And our mothers might arbitrarily take us shopping in the afternoon or to visit a friend, or make us stay at home for being late for the midday meal.

However, the decision was made, and we all went home.  It’s a funny thing, but I have very few recollections of the time when I was alone with mother whilst father was at work, and since he was a housemaster, we must have been alone together a lot.  I must have arrived on time because my mother was not angry.  Her temper was legendary in our family.  She did not stamp and shout, she simply sighed and told us it didn’t matter, but we knew we had disappointed her in some way, even if we didn’t know exactly what we had done.  Then we would spend days trying to please her, until she decided we had been punished long enough for our failing or omission and the weary silence was ended with a treat.  The treat for me, of course, was not the trip to the shops to buy a toy or the fresh-baked cake, but the ending of the silence.  I often wonder if one of the reasons that my father took the role of housemaster was that it kept him out of the home for long periods and often overnight, so that he did not have to deal with mother’s oppressive moods.  Certainly, when he became a lecturer, with much more free time at his disposal, he did not spend it at home, but became more involved in activities at the university which kept him away, often at weekends.  By that time, happily, I was a teenager, so I too spent as much time as I could away from the home, leaving mother to her patient martyrdom.

However, I digress, if only a little, because there isn’t too much more to say.  I had my dinner and I didn’t go back to The Lane in the afternoon.  I don’t know how I filled my time until father got home and children’s television started, but I imagine I stayed in my room, building a wall of imagination around myself of books and drawings and toys. 

I think it would be fair to say I was scared about what we would find; not necessarily treasure or a dead animal, but an adult secret I didn’t want to know yet.  I’m fairly certain the others didn’t go back either because when I finally plucked up the nerve to return to the scene, the grass was pristine, as if it had never been touched at all.  And when I saw them again, as I assume we must have, it was never mentioned, and no one called me a cowardy custard for staying away, which they surely would have had they returned without me.

And so we went back to our more innocent games of torturing and killing, and slowly drifted apart as our parents moved or our own education demanded that we did.  I, for example, was sent away in the footsteps of my brother to the only minor prep school my parents could afford at the time, and each time I came back for the vac, there was one less friend, or the friends that remained were taller and more distant.  In my experience, the only people who remain friends their whole lives are the people who never move away.  At Malvern and Cambridge I made only useful acquaintances and I can’t say I would have been sorry if I had never seen any of them again.

And as for the dream, if it was a dream, although you might think it seems to have figured very large in my life, I only had it once, and of course, if it really happened, then it could only have happened once.  But do I think of it often?  Well, there have certainly been times.  The birth of my son, the death of my father and mother, my divorce.  Oh yes, my wife left me several years ago.  I was, apparently, a cold fish and she had found someone warmer.  She said I reminded her of my mother.  I can’t see it myself.

Regardless of that, I returned to the school only once more, on my own.  When I told my mother I was going she only said, Why?  And I answered with a shrug and a bland, Why not?  The Headmaster was new and did not recognise father’s name on the In Memoriam board.  Neither did he offer me lunch, and he assigned one of the Sixth Form Select to escort me around.  He followed me everywhere with the supercilious disinterest that private school system teaches so well.  In the end, I gave him the slip round the back of the gymnasium and returned to my car.  Taking a folding shovel out of the boot, I made for The Lane.  It was the same as I always saw it in my dreams, and I knew exactly where to begin.  I took off my jacket and started digging. 

When they found me I was four feet down and  still there was nothing there.

SANS TEETH

Ian Meacheam

Aren’t your teeth the toughest things in your body? I thought your teeth were supposed to outlast everything else! Well, not in my case. By the time my dentist has finished with me there will be nothing left in my mouth. What a prospect for the grim reaper, a body without any hair in its usual places, most moving parts having seen better days and not been exercised significantly for years, and a pair of false teeth that won’t last a second in the flames of Hell.

From the very first time I went to the dentist, accompanied by my mother, to the latest visit, earlier today, some sixty years later, I, like most sane people, have hated the whole experience of visiting the dentist. Why do we call it a visit, anyway? It sounds as if it should be a fun time with laughter and cream cakes. There is nothing to laugh at and nothing that constitutes pleasure when a dentist visits your mouth when you visit a dentist. You would have to have teeth made out of pure diamonds or endure a life-long diet that comprises of nothing more than water in order to leave the dentist without a gapless smile on your face.

I think my first memory of a visit to the dentists was a strange man poking and prodding around and telling me to be a brave boy. He was not a paedophile...I think...merely a sadist. He would try to stem my tears at the end of the ordeal by giving me a lollipop and then tell my mom that I shouldn’t eat too many sweets! I should have known then that I should never trust anyone who claims to be a dentist, dental surgeon, endodontist or orthodontist. They are all just fancy names for weirdos who haven’t got the qualifications to work in a butcher’s shop, who enjoy looking up people’s noses and like the smell of bad breath. 

The next series of appointments I had to cope with some four or five years later were due to a case of serious overcrowding. This was not in the dentist’s waiting room; it was overcrowding in my cake hole. Apparently, and ironically looking back now, I had too many teeth and as a result my top and bottom rows of teeth were crooked and out of alignment. Several teeth had to be removed so that the rest would straighten up. The extraction process was supposed to be painless as I would have gas. Yes, my torturer was going to legally gas me and while I was asleep in his chair, I would magically lose four teeth as well as my childhood. How could my parents allow this pervert to do this to me? I would have preferred crooked teeth. But I had no say in the matter, mainly because he had several instruments of torture shoved in my gob. When I woke up some forty minutes later, I couldn’t feel anything above my neck. My mouth was full of blood and gaps and I was told to rinse my mouth out as if I had been a bad boy. Just at the moment, in my gaseous state, I didn’t know if I was a boy or a girl, let alone bad or good. I tried to rinse my mouth out with the salted water but couldn’t find my mouth with the glass and promptly spilled the liquid down my trousers. I didn’t mind too much really, as it hid the evidence of how scared I was before the gas mask was even fitted to my face.

Eventually, after being treated to an hour’s worth of sado-masochism, I was allowed to go...for now. Little did I know, as my mom helped me to the bus stop and a deserved afternoon off school, that Dr Crippen had more evil plans for me. I returned to his little surgery of horrors a few weeks later where he explained that I would need to wear braces for a while. I didn’t quite understand at the time what that meant. How would keeping my trousers up help with my teeth? Maybe he had turned his attention to other boys and he was no longer interested in me. But alas, as I am sure you have worked out by now, this was much worse than a fashion addition, this was half a ton of metal, glued and screwed onto my teeth for an indefinite number of months or years. I was just starting secondary school and there I was, a lost little kid with metal framed glasses and a bag of spanners in my mouth. I might just as well have worn a sign on my new school uniform saying Please Bully Me or Please Take The Piss. It would have to be a sign as I wasn’t able to say the words correctly - it would have sounded like Plith Take Te Pith.

For the next two years or so, I rode the teasing, taunting and terrorising of the boys in my class. The only consolation was that they only hit me on the body as they were worried about injuring their hands if they punched me in the face. As you can imagine, I wasn’t lucky with girls either with all that metal on and in my face. I was hardly a babe magnet - although magnets were attracted to me!

Two years, three months and sixteen days later the braces were removed. It was weird not having the braces anymore. Overnight things changed. I was five pounds lighter for a start. I could use a normal toothbrush instead of a power drill to clear the crap that had collected between the girders in my mouth. I could look at myself in the mirror and smile. I would also like to say that the boys accepted me into their alpha friendship groups and the girls queued up to snog me and my perfect teeth, but that wasn’t the case. Even after starting to wear contact lenses, for the remainder of my secondary school years, I was still called by my ironic nickname – Superman, Man of Steel.

For a few years after that, I enjoyed a life without too many issues with my teeth, just regular check-ups that I managed to survive. I had just finished college, found a job and moved into a flat. I was no longer a student. I was a proper adult. A man of means. An independent person. It was then that I realised that my six monthly ‘visits’ to the dentist were not free. I had to pay for the privilege of the fear and pain. And if I had to have any procedures done, well, then I could forget about eating or drinking for a while as my bank account had been extracted of all of my hard-earned money.

It wasn’t too long before I entered the Fillings phase of my life. This was the time when my teeth - these really tough macho guys who lived in my mouth - started to feel a bit old and decrepit. By my late twenties some of my teeth were basically telling me that they were feeling their age and started to ache once I used them. After a meal, they would have to rest to ease the pain. They needed help. They needed the equivalent of a sticking plaster on the teeth in question. Of course, it wasn’t that easy to make a tooth feel young and healthy again. You can’t just squirt it with fertilizer or Epsom Salts. You can’t tell the tooth to lose a bit of weight or go to the gym. You can’t tell a tooth to go to CBT or mindfulness classes. You can’t advise a tooth to have an affair or join a religious cult. No, you have to go to a dentist to cure the pain by giving you even more pain.

Each time the dentist would explain that to save a tooth that was showing its age I would have to give him a great deal of money from my savings and then he would devise an excruciating way to make me and my teeth feel better. It involved a long needle, a power drill, and molten metal with a dash of blood and saliva.

I’m pleased to say, in one respect, that the days of gassing young children for dental procedures were over. It was clearly seen as cruel and criminal. Now dentists would use a more humane approach – they would stick a long needle into your gums several times and administer anaesthetic to freeze your mouth. The idea was that you might be able to see what was going on but you couldn’t feel it. In my case the anaesthetic would deaden my senses so that I couldn’t feel any pain while the Black and Decker drill ground away parts of the tooth in order to create a neat hole that could be filled with metal. The problem always seemed to be that the drill would always hit a nerve and no matter how much anaesthetic I was given it couldn’t mask the pain that shot through every part of my body. If, at that moment, I had been a vastly experienced, military-trained spy, I would still have told the dentist everything I knew about my country’s top secrets!

Once that part of the ordeal was over, the gaping hole left in the remainder of the tooth was packed with the metallic equivalent of Polyfilla. This would take some time to set and be solid enough to use to eat.

This performance would be repeated on a regular basis over the next few years and by now I was looking like the baddy Jaws from the James Bond films. Perhaps I was a spy after all!

So, my days of smiling properly were over. I could smirk at girls but I dare not open my mouth too wide in case I revealed the scrap yard that had received planning permission in my orifice. Looking back, however, I suppose that was a good lesson for life and survival – in the company of a woman, keep your mouth closed! Eyes open, mouth shut.

My teeth were going through a refurbishment. Instead of the materials of cementum, pulp, dentin and enamel, my mouth was full of scrap metal. The only up-side to this was the more metal I had, the more I could eat all of the things that had been a pain to chew. When I say things, what I really mean is that I could eat all of the wrong things without feeling guilty or being in excruciating agony - items like frozen yoghurt or rock-hard peanut brittle. These metal additions in my mouth gave me superpowers against killer food. I could eat sugary, cold or hard treats without