Ba ba black sheep you have some wool,
Yes sir, no sir, three bags full.
one for my master and one for my lady,
and one for the little boy who lives down the street.
The boy lived down the street in one of the cottages on the farm.
The cabins did not have electricity as the cables were not considered aesthetic. The boy no longer lives there; he fell into the pond and drowned. The pond no longer exists; was refilled.
Choo was not that little boy. However, he has no wool, he has rationing instead.
But Choo is lucky. He has an older brother, so he keeps all his brother’s old clothes. He is very proud to have a blazer and a cap. He likes the uniforms.
He adores his older brother. When he was a baby, his brother strapped her Victoria Perambulator to his bike and pretended it was a horse and cart and rode it through the streets. The neighbors did not approve. His sister wasn’t going to have a fag for his little brother either; so her baby curls came out.
Now he teaches Choo to climb on the roof of the farm. It is really a manor house with a large arch that divides it in two through which a horse-drawn carriage can pass. There is an old coach in a field and Choo and his friends play in it. They climb on the roof at night because it’s not allowed.
Podge, your sister went up during the day because she’s not allowed out at night. She is also not allowed to play with her brothers when they are having adventures. One day she saw a ladder left by a workman and climbed up it. She sat at the top of the arch waving to the people. She wasn’t afraid. Small children are not afraid to climb. They just don’t know how to get down. Choo’s older brother had to climb on her and rescue her because there were no men. Instead, there was a war.
Choo’s brother is an intern at the high school. He went there when he was six years old. It is very sad for Choo when he returns to his school after the holidays. He crawls to the foot of the bed and cries. Kim his dog climbs on his bed and cries with him. Small children are allowed to cry if no one sees them and Kim won’t tell because he is a very loyal dog.
Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats and Liddle Lamzy Divey
A childish dive, right?
Yeah! Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats and Little Lamzy Divey
A childish dive too, right?
The boy was learning to become a knight. He received proper riding lessons to learn how to have a good seat and keep his back straight. He also went to school but had problems with the letters and always put the S backwards.
Because there was a war, there was no beef or pork, so he had to live off the land. He was lucky that he lived in the land of milk and honey. He didn’t like milk but he loved honey. Very thick yellowish brown honey with white on top. The honeycombs were beautiful and he was not afraid of the bees in their hives. The fruit of the land was delicious. Apples and pears and cherries and plums from the orchard, and strawberries and blackberries when he walked the roads. Even the vegetables were delicious. Asparagus dipped in hot butter (cholesterol hadn’t been invented then) and peas that he and his sister used to scoop out. It was his job to look for the eggs. The chickens would put them in all sorts of fun places and he would put them in a bowl of water to see if they would sink or float. The eggs were wrapped in newspaper to preserve them. Much of the fruit was cooked and bottled by his mother. The salt came in big blocks like a loaf of bread.
Maybe there wasn’t much meat in the butcher shop but there was pheasant and the hills were full of rabbits. Kim the dog loved to chase rabbits. One day his mother, talking to a friend, remembered that there were half a dozen skinless rabbits on the kitchen table. Since she didn’t want her little darling to be shocked to see her death, she hurried to the kitchen. She found Choo calmly stroking the rabbits and saying “lovely din din, lovely din din”. He was a very pragmatic young man.
However, he was a good soldier and, like his compatriots, he knew his duty and suffered alongside them by taking his daily dose of cod-liver oil.
He also ate other things. Once, during a holiday in Tintagel, his mother, watching Choo sleep at night, found him foaming at the mouth. She shook him by the ankles and a halfpenny came out. The doctor said that she had been in her stomach for six months. She hadn’t heard of Adam either and ate the poisonous red berries that she had been told not to eat. His mother gave him pints of salt water to make him vomit. She should have put it in the car instead of her. When she put him in the car to take him to some important place (there was not much gas, she was also rationed) he was always sick with his best clothes.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty dumpty had a big fall
all kings horses and all kings men
he couldn’t get Humpty back together.
Choo was already scarred, but not yet from the war. He had fallen down the stairs and a tooth had gone through his lips. He had fallen off his pony and put a big hole in his knee. Blood was everywhere. His older sister kept asking if he was going to die.
He had already been under the surgeon’s knife. He and his sister had had their tonsils removed. On the kitchen table where the pheasants and rabbits were also gutted. He remembers the surgeon with what looked like his mother’s tea strainer with some muslin on top of it and a few drops of liquid (ether) on it. Perhaps the doctor had forgotten something and her mother had lent him her tea strainer.
Then disaster struck. Scarlet fever. The farm was quarantined by the town. No one came except the doctor. Even faithful Lily abandoned her post. Choo was sick, then his mom got sick too, but Podge didn’t. Her mother dragged a mattress on her hands and knees to the kitchen and the three of them lived there to keep warm. Choo can’t remember much. Images like snapshots with the edges blackened as if they were going to burst into flames. They both recovered.
Then disaster struck again. How long after Choo can’t remember. Choo’s mother was taken to the hospital. She had a rare blood type and they had taken too much blood for the war effort and when she herself got sick there was no more to give back. The doctors gave up. Choo’s mother gave up. Everyone was waiting for the end. Choo’s father was called home. He was a civil engineer and was building airfields and submarine pens for the war.
Choo’s father went to the hospital, saw his wife and said, “What are you doing there, woman? The children need you. Get up and go home.” He was a tough man. But Choo’s mother was a tough woman, and she decided right then and there to stop feeling sorry for herself and get better.
He lived to be ninety-three years and ten months.
Other than mumps and whooping cough etc. the worst was over and Choo soon forgot the crisis and went back to wandering the hills or riding his pony.
When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurray, hurrah,
Then we will give you a warm welcome,
Hooray, hooray!
The band played in the village street and the family learned that the war was over, at least in Europe. Japan was far away and the concept of it as a place was difficult for Choo to understand.
Her mother decided to bake a victory cake. The problem was finding something to color the blue in the red, white and blue frosting. She debated using part of one of those blue buckets that went into the laundry. She was on the list of prohibited substances that Choo could not put in his mouth. Choo had a great experience with banned substances. He was afraid that his mother would wipe out the family on victory day.
Only one house had been destroyed and its occupants killed. It was a long way out of town, tucked away in a secluded grove; it was not known how it had been bombed.
It was decided to move house. To go to a place called Surrey. They would take Kim the dog, of course. They would also take the chickens and roosters because rationing awaited them. It was not thought that the life expectancy of the rooster would be great. There would be neighbors who lived over the garden fence and not over the hills and far away where the wise neighbors lived. There would be something called friction. They would leave Choo and Podge behind. Choo would become a little boy with a name of his own and now we’ll call him little boy instead of little boy. Podge was getting pretty and her pretty sisters were a social asset, but they needed a proper name for her, so even though she still had her pretty name for everyone, her siblings decided to call her Jane Ayre. But that was her own private name. The young man didn’t know where she was coming from but he felt that she sounded superior. The older brother would leave the preparatory school where he had won the Victor Laudorum and become a cadet. He would have a beautiful new navy blue uniform with big gold buttons. The boy would go to a new school and get his own new uniform.