The sound of bells always amused me and our family lived opposite the church in the village of Mentall Wallcock in Devon in the summer in England in fact, so daily life was a laugh. My father broached casks for a living and my mother spent her time between looking after us (my two brothers, a sister and a caravan) and beating up drunks in the police cells. Once the drunks brought in that night had settled down the local police let her into the cells during the small hours of Saturday and Sunday to kick shit out of them. She loved it and would sometimes take a friend from the pop-in centre or maybe a weapon of sorts. My father didn't approve of this, he said it wasn't right for a woman to behave that way, preferring her to do dragster racing "ur summut". I knew why he didn't like it though, it was because he knew some of the drunks from Boat Club and they said she could be a vicious woman at times, especially when she had weaponry. Either way, it gave her an opportunity to let off steam that many women didn't get around where we lived.

My father was a quiet man who's job at the cask factory kept him out of the house from eight in the morning until seven at night. He used to finish work at about five but liked to spend an hour or so at Boat Club with a few friends. I never knew and still don't know what Boat Club is, all I did know was that it was on the river and it smelt odd. He never took me there so I never knew what it even looked like on the inside, but a friend of his, Mr. Fany, who was one of the drunks, told me once that it was the grandest place you could imagine on the inside, "it may look like a gippo's arse from the outside," he said, "but once you go through those doors you're in another world of rich stuff that you or I might never think of." He was quite hard to understand sometimes so I didn't mind that my mother used to whack him about a bit.

My father never said much and when he did he was as hard to understand as Mr. Fany. When I was small he would come up to me on occasion and bend down so that his torso was at a right angle to his legs, face level with his waist and stare hard into my eyes. After a minute or so of staring he would turn his head 180 degrees until it was facing upwards and spit huge gobbets of phlegm and eggy mess a long way into the air, so far that it disappeared. He would then stand up straight and walk a couple of paces back moving me to his side where we would wait. I don't know how he got the timing sorted out but without fail someone, a man or a child or sometimes a farmer who knew him would come along, and he would engage them in interesting conversation for a bit. Then splat, the bits he had shot into the air several minutes before came down again right on the heads of these unsuspecting people. Once this happened to the same person three days in a row, he wasn't even a drunk, just a bit thick I think.

My parents got on well in a quiet sort of way, even though they were very different. My brothers though, were energetic boys, always playing and getting into trouble. My sister Tambien was very sensible, she joined Light Club when she was old enough, that's how sensible she was. I remember one time Vee and Jyna, they were my father's nicknames for the boys, took food from the kitchen and a canoe, from the canoe shed at the end of our garden, out to sea. They were gone for a week. Mother was angry because they hadn't told her where they were going and got even angrier when they tried to argue that they couldn't have told her where they were going because the sea is big and much the same wherever you go on it, how the hell could they have known where they were. Mother was a stickler for navigation and said they should have taken charts and a sextant and a chronometer like the H4 or something. She could be a hard woman sometimes.

I can't remember why the bells made me laugh now, but that doesn't surprise me, does it.

© Henry E Jones, 2006-2010 – henryejones.com