Making a clean breast of it…
It’s probably best to cut a long story short and simply tell you that this week’s ALAW was inspired by a couple of events a few years apart – one on a riverside walk in Tewkesbury and t’other at a cafĂŠ in Arbroath.
A woman whose bosom was large
Once asked the tattooist in charge
If she loosened her robes
And paraded her globes
Would he draw on her dĂŠcolletage?!
… and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day
I am indebted to Laurence Fox, erstwhile leader of the newly minted ‘Reclaim Party’, for inspiring this week’s ALAW. His most recent populist tweet, seeking once more to belittle the British Broadcasting Corporation, brought a crushing response from a bunch of Anglo-Irish rapscallions:
So, here we go…
An actor once entered stage right
And tried to Reclaim the light
But that parcel of rogues
That we know as The Pogues
Just beasted that herrenvolk sh*te!
A Grimm tale with a happy ending
Some lines inspired by a fake President.
A former political bruiser,
And misogynistic abuser
Thought he was the kingpin,
But now Trumplethinskin
Is simply an awful bad LOSER!
SAD!
A family at war
I have previously written about the life and experiences of my great uncle Harold, a wounded survivor of the First World War who also volunteered in the Second World War in support of the D-Day landings (see here and here).
I also had three uncles who served in the Second World War; Tot, who died at sea, Jack, who survived the land war and Doug, the eldest of his siblings, an electrical engineer in a reserved occupation who was unable to volunteer for active service or to be conscripted.
Tot was the second oldest of the brothers and served as an engineering officer in the Merchant Navy as poor eyesight caused him to be rejected by the Royal Navy. In 1941 he broke his leg when ashore in the United States and, although permitted to recuperate there, he chose to travel home on his convoy vessel, the SS Empire Crossbill, as a supernumary Fourth Engineer.
Empire Crossbill was an American cargo ship built in 1919 as the West Amargosa and laid up in 1937. In 1940 she was transferred to the UK Ministry of War Transport and renamed the Empire Crossbill. After several successful crossings of the North Atlantic, she mustered in Cape Breton in August 1941 as part of Slow Convoy 42 bound for Liverpool.
SC42 was attacked by the Markgraf wolfpack of 14 German submarines that was on patrol southeast of Greenland. The attack extended over three night nights, 9-11 September. Empire Crossbill was torpedoed by U-82 east of Cape Farewell at 03.11 GMT on 11 September 1941 and sank with all hands: 38 crew, 10 gunners, and one passenger – Thomas Lang Forster, aged 23.
Of the 65 merchant vessels that comprised SC42, sixteen – almost one quarter of the convoy – were lost. U-82 was itself sunk with the loss of all 45 crew just a few months later on 6 February 1942, north of the Azores, having been depth charged by HMS Rochester and HMS Tamarisk. Its captain, Kapitänleutnant Siegfried Rollmann, was 27 – just four years older than Tot.
Jack, the youngest of the three brothers, survived the war having experienced both the Dunkirk evacuation and the D-Day landings.
Prior to the Dunkirk evacuation, he had been with 285 Battery, 72nd Field Regiment, Royal Artillery 50th Northumberland Division, a part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). His Division was one of the last to leave Dunkirk as it had been tasked to destroy any installations as the BEF retreated. Jack and his companions joined one of the last ships, if not the last, that departed Dunkirk. He landed at Margate on 2 June 1940.
As far as his family was concerned, Jack was missing in action, so it was a great relief to them that a telegram arrived from him on 3 June. No “Hello Mam, I’m fine”, but just one line asking her to ‘wire’ 10 shillings (50 pence) to him care of the General Post Office in Rugely Staffordshire!
The 50th Northumberland Division (and Jack) then went on to fight in the North African desert war with General Montgomery and landed on Sword beach on D-Day itself. He was on active service from the time of the BEF to VE Day.
Jack being Jack, he was almost court martialled on VE Day itself. He had been listening on the radio to Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s speech announcing the end of the war in Europe when a senior officer sent for him. He refused to attend the officer and told the messenger to go away saying that he was busy. Jack was subsequently escorted under armed guard to the officer’s room.
I don’t think the officer could have seen much action, certainly not compared to Jack, and on learning of his involvement at Dunkirk, in North Africa, and on D-Day, the officer absolved him of any offence. Many years later they were reunited on Breakfast TV in a segment to mark the 40th anniversary of VE Day and retold their story on air. (I have never watched breakfast TV apart from that one morning, but, unfortunately, despite viewing it from 6am until about 9.50, I never saw his contribution – my employer’s flexitime limit meant that I had to be clocked in by 10am and Jack’s contribution only came later – we had no video recorder at that time.)
NB. Some of the above is taken from archived records detailing the events mentioned, the rest is taken from the family matriarch’s tome ‘A European Family’ and archival material held by family members.
Postscript: This is Jack’s personal recollection of the D-Day landings…
Normandy
The journey we made from Portsmouth to Normandy in France was unforgettable. We travelled in a ‘Landing Craft Tank [L.C.T]’ and to some, the journey was a veritable nightmare. The transport consisted of very long barges, designed to carry eleven tanks, and acted like huge white whales; they would rise from the water towards the sky and then crash onto the sea again after each swell.
It was a welcome relief to land on Sword beach with the main assault troops of the 3rd British Infantry division. The tanks, which went straight into action, left first and at the same time the ramp was in about 15 feet of water.
We were a signal section, part of the advance signals H.Q. and were issued with only handcarts containing wireless equipment. We managed to get a line ashore and the carts, being waterfproof and containing air, floated just below the surface. During this time shells were falling closer and closer. The L.C.T. Captain bawling “Get the hell out of here”, added to the threatening atmosphere. Fortunately we made dry land with only one casualty and that was the barrage balloon we were painstakingly carrying for the beach defence. It was shot down!
We struggled over the beach and found some protection in a farm just inland from the French holiday resort of Lion-sur-mer. Some holiday! Leaving the wireless operators to set up their equipments, driver Morgan and I set about clearing up the area following the tank and infantry assault. My binoculars and watch had been damaged by the sea water but I was able to replace them with those of a German Officer who sadly had no further use of them.
One of our tasks was to search the sleeping quarters below the fortress which had been designed to keep us out. While a young Welsh soldier covered me with my revolver I found two young Germans cowering in the upper bunks. They were terrified and I had to drag them out as they were convinced they were going to be shot. They were no more than seventeen years old and begged us not to shoot them. Having survived the previous infantry attack when many of their comrades had been killed, they were relieved to find out that they were destined for prison camp and safety.
It was unfortunate that our D-Day objective, Caen, was not taken for a further two weeks due to the arrival of Rommel and his famous Panzer troops. They had come north in an attempt to hurl us back into the sea. Rommel must have been extremely unhappy when he realised that both the 3rd. and the 50th. Divisions of the British Army were the ones that prevented him from doing so because he knew that they were the last ones to leave Dunkirk in 1940.
Postscript: Since this was originally posted, I have been able to access some further documents relating to Tot. These are presented below:
(i) Tot looking resplendent in his Merchant Navy engineer’s uniform…
(ii) The families of the Empire Crossbill’s crew would have all received the following notification a few days after the vessel was sunk. It holds the forlorn hope that its crew may have been saved…
(iii) When it was known that no-one had survived the sinking, the families received the sympathies of King George VI…
(iv) Tot’s service medals accompanied by regrets that he never lived to receive them…
(v) Finally, a personal reminder. Tot’s business card…
On being a bad loser…
I can think of no better occasion to recycle these lines dedicated to Donald Trump, from Lorna Wallace’s award-winning poem-in-the-style-of-Burns:
Poutinâ, glaikit through this farce,
His mooth wis pursed up like an arse,
His Tangoed coupon glowinâ like
A skelped backside.
Today I’ll offend a nation…
…by moderating the accolades paid to its favourite son who died earlier this week.
Sean Connery, for it is he, has just died at the age of 90 and, I have to confess that I am one of the minority upon whom his ‘big-screen charisma’ was entirely lost (and I’m not a great fan of tax exiles, either).
My minority status has been well and truly confirmed by the plaudits he has received from the worldwide press and Twitterati on his status as an iconic film star; the ‘best’ James Bond, a man’s man, a woman’s man and so on and on and on.
And that’s all well and good, but his is in spite of his first wife’s claim in her autobiography that he had abused her both physically and mentally, albeit an allegation that he denied.
Disregarding those claims, he is, nevertheless, on public record as having justified male violence against women:
In 1965, aged 35, he said that “I donât think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman- although I donât recommend doing it in the same way that youâd hit a man. An open-handed slap is justified if all other alternatives failâ.
In 1987, aged 57, he reiterated that view. âI havenât changed my opinion … I donât think itâs good, I donât think itâs that bad. I think it depends entirely on the circumstances and if it merits it … If you have tried everything else â and women are pretty good at this â they canât leave it alone. They want to have the last word and you give them the last word, but theyâre not happy with the last word. They want to say it again, and get into a really provocative situation, then I think itâs absolutely right.â
It took him until old age before he rejected his previous lifetime’s view, stating in 2006, aged 76, that “My view is I don’t believe that any level of abuse against women is ever justified under any circumstances. Full stop.”
It’s good that he changed his mind, but a shame that it took him so long to do so. So long in fact, that the damage had already been done and, for other than apologists for abuse (“typical of a generation and a certain type of man”), there will always be that stain on his character.
There once was an old-school male chauvinist
Whose character flaws can’t be dismissed,
‘Cos his words correspond
To the ‘charms’ of James Bond:
An antidiluvian misogynist!
I went to a Grammar(less) School
Last week I came across a list of grammatical constructs that were explained using variations of the a man walked into a bar one-liner. I didn’t understand them all and still don’t, but one that resonated with me was this:
A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
Why should that have resonance? Well, you see, I was never taught English grammar at primary or secondary school by any means other than a single year of English language classes with ‘Whacker’ Wilkins at Kendal Grammar School (spot the irony in the school’s name) and, even then, most of his focus seemed to be on ‘unflattening’ our northern vowels.
So it was up to Nigel Molesworth, that scion of Geoffrey Willans’ imagination, to instruct me in the intricacies of English grammar via the pages of his Down With Skool quadrilogy on life at St Custard’s.
The books were famously illustrated by Ronald Searle and it is through his drawings and Molesworth’s narrative that I first came across the beast that is the gerund.
I met it again, many years later, when Firstborn was at secondary school, and we hosted Felicitas, her German penfriend, whose English was superb. One tea-time Felicitas told us that she’d previously learned about a ‘funny’ grammatical construct; the gerund. That was the cue for a family of four Brits to stare blankly at one another whilst wondering what exactly is a gerund, and rapidly changing the subject (“So, Felicitas, what do you think of Scotland?”).
Thereafter I made an effort to learn the intricacies of verbs functioning as nouns and ending in -ing. (I subsequently learned that gerunds also exist in the German language. What Felicitas must have found funny – as in peculiar – is that in German a gerund is just a capitalised infinitive rather than one whose spelling is changed to end with ‘ing’.)
More recently, I have also discovered that Down With Skool is not quite the nadir of academe that it first appears. What follows is the abstract from a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in The Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia:
Geoffrey Willansâ and Ronald Searleâs Molesworth books, published in four volumes between 1953 and 1959, are a series of boarding school parodies. Despite great sales success and cult popularity, the books have been dismissed by academics and book reviewers alike as dated satires. Isabel Quigly calls them âpure farceâ (276), while Thomas Jones claims they are âterribly cosyâ (para. 7). This thesis adopts three pertinent theories of Mikhail Bakhtin in order to reconsider the four books in the series â Down with Skool!, How to be Topp, Whizz for Atomms, and Back in the Jug Agane. Through the application of Bakhtinâs concepts of chronotope, heteroglossia and carnival, I show that the Molesworth books are more complex and radical than first assumed, and therefore constitute a remarkable response to the phenomenon of the boarding school genre. ŠElizabeth Jean Milner Walker 2009.
So there you have it. I learned my grammar from books that ‘constitute a remarkable response to the phenomenon of the boarding school genre’ – who’d have thunk it!
Here’s the limerick:
At St Custard’s, a school of renown,
Molesworth – who played the class clown –
Set out on an errand
And found that a gerund
Is a verb that acts as a noun!
(This is misleading because in Molesworth’s experience, gerunds are actually creatures with a trunk-like nose, a specimen of which was discovered in the grounds of St Custard’s by Kennedy and taken into captivity – as any fule kno!)
Postscript: Here are the grammatical ‘one-liners’ referenced above:
An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
⢠A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
⢠A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
⢠An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
⢠Two quotation marks walk into a âbar.â
⢠A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
⢠Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
⢠A question mark walks into a bar?
⢠A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
⢠Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Get out — we don’t serve your type.”
⢠A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
⢠A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
⢠Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
⢠A synonym strolls into a tavern.
⢠At the end of the day, a clichĂŠ walks into a bar — fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
⢠A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
⢠Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
⢠A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
⢠An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
⢠The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
⢠A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
⢠The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
⢠A dyslexic walks into a bra.
⢠A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
⢠A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
⢠A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
⢠A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony
– Jill Thomas Doyle
đśOnly shades of greyđś
A younger friend has just posted a picture of himself on a group WhatsApp chat, bemoaning the fact that his beard “is getting a lot of grey in it now”. Well, Aamir, old mate, that’s life (and don’t I know it)! And this is the limerick…
A pogonophile was once heard to say
He was sure that there’d come a day
When he looked at his beard
And t’would be, as he feared,
An image in ten shades of grey!
Tiers of a clown…
So, Boris Johnson and his UK government continues with its impersonation of a headless chicken trying to grasp at straws whilst dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. His ‘world beating’ test and trace system has risen to the giddy heights of having had only “a marginal impact” unlike, say, Germany’s which has been much more successful.
And now we have a new flagship policy by way of a tiered approach to local lockdowns. It’s a policy that has set the north of England against the south and one that northern leaders are refusing to support or communicate to the affected populations; indeed, Manchester’s mayor has stated that he will not let the regionâs people be canaries in the coalmine.
So much for a flagship policy! It may prove to have beneficial attributes, but the way that it has been developed and enacted has been counter-productive to say the least. Conversely, it may have an unfortunate historical resonance with Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose. It sank with the loss of hundreds of lives. Only time will tell.
I think a limerick is called for…
A sagely scientist appears
To have confirmed the worst of our fears.
He said with a shriek
“We’re all up s**t creek
And it’s bound to end up in tiers!”
Postscript: Having left this week’s limerick to the last minute, I am obliged to Firstborn for suggesting ‘tiers’ as a theme around which it could be based. Parental acclamation radiates from me đ
The Traveling Dogburys
I can’t abide dog owners that don’t clean up their dog’s mess and I really cannot understand those that do bag it up, but then leave the bag lying around or even hanging off a bush. I mean, why?
{start virtue signalling}
All of which explains why I took a 34 mile round trip to retrieve a bag of doggy-dos that I had inadvertently left behind after one of @calliebordeaux‘s agility classes. I’d put it down by the side of my van while I gave her some water and then promptly forgot about it until I arrived home. Cue a return trip to recover it.
{end virtue signalling}
As well as not understanding some dog owners, there are times that I don’t understand my pup either. She loves to get out and about, but always pretends not to whenever she sees me with her lead and harness.
And then there are her, erm, toileting habits. Most dogs seem to leave a single pile of muck, but not mine. Oh no. She goes walkabout and leaves a trail of messages, each of which needs to be spotted if they’re to be bagged. Still, it has inspired this…
There once was a young puppy who
Had bowels that were somewhat askew.
So she ‘held on’ until
She couldn’t stand still
Then set off on a travelling poo.
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