It's Only Words

Bill Cariad

Description

This is a collection of short stories, verse, and so-named 'Flash Fiction' for the male or female reader who enjoys variety. Topical themes covered by the short stories range from Crime drama (from differing perspectives) Satire (you may even think you recognize a character or two!) and Comedy pieces doing their best to raise a smile or a chuckle. So if you would like to know what might have happened to a pacifist during the first world war, then there's a story here for you. If you want to find out how a man called Malone deals with his unfaithful wife, there's a story here for you. If you want to visit a coward's grave (with a difference) you can do so within these pages. If the spiritual world interests you, then hopefully you will find something positive to take from 'It's Only Words', the short story bearing the title which has been given to this collection. As for the versed work within this collection, the author has again ranged across a multi-coloured palate of subject matter. He has written to amuse you or stimulate you, or even move you if he has caught you at a time when a particular piece may resonate within you as you read.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 09 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785381393
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
IT’S ONLY WORDS
A Collection of Short Stories and Verse
Written By Bill Cariad



Publisher Information
It’s Only Words
Published in 2015 by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Bill Cariad to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2015 Bill Cariad
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Dedication
I dedicate this collection to three people who live in my heart.
For Maureen, my very own Welsh princess, who captured my Scottish heart twelve years ago and still makes it sing. A heart which would have stopped beating, had it not been for her skill.
And for Alan, the brother who was lost to me but made it his business to find me all those years ago. I will always be grateful for his tenacity, and his affection.
And for Colin Spriggs, the man who gifted me his friendship. Which I treasure.



It Has All Been Said
I speak as a simple wordsmith,
using rusty rough-hewn tools,
who lusts for an uncovered lexicon,
to bedeck you with its jewels.
I would like to put together
the words in such a way,
your eyes would smart, I’d break your heart,
once read, what’s said, a memory to stay.
The chance to be original,
the words to be the first
to hold you when you touch the page,
to feed your hunger and to slake your thirst.
You could use me as a pick-me-up,
or put me down at will,
occasionally quote me, even say you wrote me,
read me to excite or to still.
On stage and screen, or in between
the covers of the years,
the lexicon of language lives
to stoke our rage or calm our fears.
So alas and alack of the means
to realize my foolish dreams,
needs must continue to derive permutations to surprise.
To think of leading, not being led, to try forgetting
It has all been said.



Passion-Dale Sunset
For Albert Fosdyke, shell-shocked pacifist and photographer, the eventful 17 th day of October 1917 reluctantly died in shades of cloudy grey. He silently watched now, through his steel-barred aperture, the demise of day birthing night as an undamaged part of his fractured mind began snatching at glimpses of brighter endings to better days. Sunsets and Albert shared many memories...
While hidden storm clouds were already forming in the stratosphere over Austria, an English evening sky of saffron had awakened medical-student Albert’s artistic soul. Rousing his desire to capture, and hold, the myriad of colours spilling from the celestial palette. Frustrated foraging in his modest toolbox of available skills had found only his inability to successfully marry oils to canvas.
Co-incidentally, on June 28 th 1914, as Archduke Ferdinand’s driver took a fateful wrong turn into a narrow Sarajevo street, a holidaying Albert Fosdyke stumbled onto an unmapped track in a Welsh valley and, under an evening sky of magenta, found an attractive and ankle-sprained woman in distress and lost his heart.
Over the following week, Priscilla Holbrook, army major’s mature and unhappy wife, lone hill-walker and avid photographer, carefully steered Albert’s magic carpet-ride of romance. With a most gratifying sense of gallantry, how could she manage otherwise?, he was easily persuaded to share her holiday cottage nestling in the valley’s Lea, or, as Priscilla preferred, the Dale.
Their conversations recognized neither timepiece nor boundary, and, energised by forces unknown to Albert, he matched her revelations as comfortably as he did her stride on their walks to shared discovery. She introduced him to the world of the camera, humbling him with her knowledge and expertise whilst seducing him with her verbal caresses when he revealed his own unfulfilled artistic bent. Let the camera become your medium, she’d inspiringly suggested. And on their last evening in the Welsh valley, under a sky-blazing fusion of indigo, magenta, and saffron, she took his virginity and, momentarily, his power of coherent speech. Indelibly branding his senses with her touch and scent. We must always remember this valley as our very own passion-dale, she’d softly whispered.
On the morning they parted, with an apology for having used her husband’s stationery, Priscilla gave Albert her sketch depicting the unmapped track with a cross marking the spot where they’d met. Branching right from the track, she’d drawn the stream where they’d bathed their feet, and her sky-line was broken by explosive strokes climbing from ground level to reach and surround the disappearing fireball of a sun. Albert, recognizing this graphic memorial to his coming-of-age climactic sunset, was still blushing when Priscilla, advising him he must rely on natural bright light for outdoor shots, presented him with the Kodak vest-pocket camera. I shall return to the cottage each year on the same dates, she’d informed him. Leaving the promise, unspoken, in his mind.
On August 7 th 1914, three days after Britain declared war on Germany, Albert Fosdyke, concealing both pacifist views and vest-pocket camera, responded to Kitchener’s call for 100,000 volunteers and joined The Royal Army Medical Corps to begin his journey through hell on earth. Which finally brought him, on October 12 th 1917, to the French fields of liquid-mud preventing allied forces advancing beyond Passchendaele Ridge.
What remained of the Medical Corps Captain’s uniform hung in mud-encrusted shreds from the shell-shocked wreck of the man being held upright before Colonel Percival Holbrook, commanding officer of The First Battalion Welsh Fusiliers. Holbrook, himself in shock but for a different reason, considered the reported facts he at least, thus far, understood. The man, evidently an officer, but not of the Fusiliers so not therefore, strictly speaking, a brother officer, had been seen taking photographs of the Lines and the Ridge. This was expressly forbidden and an offence punishable by death. Moreover, when the shelling had recommenced the man had reportedly been struck but had continued using the camera whilst screaming he was a pacifist and a photographer.
Where the Colonel’s understanding ceased, and his own shock began, lay before him on his table in the shape of a tattered piece of stationery upon which had been drawn a map. The Colonel’s first shock had been to see his own name and London address, under his past rank of Major, at the top of the stationery. This had been briskly dismissed by his Intelligence officer as an obvious act of theft at some point in the past. Of more urgent importance to his Intelligence officer was the map itself. Was this line branching right, not the river Lys? And if so, was the line it branched from the intended advance point of the enemy? What of this other line, with an explosion apparently being depicted? Was this not the Passchendaele Ridge? Was this man an agent of the enemy? Was this cross marking a rendezvous point?
As the babbling wretch was led away, Colonel Percival Holbrook stared down at the unknown and the familiar. He had no idea how his personal stationery had found its way into the man’s hands, and, like his Intelligence officer, could only guess at the map, but the Colonel’s real shock lay in the fact that, even in sketch form, he recognized his wife’s hand.
Albert Fosdyke, bloodied pacifist, one-time lover and doomed photographer, stood on the bed to look through the bars and that still functioning part of his brain acknowledged the irony of what he saw. Priscilla had told him that in 1827, Joseph Niepce, a veteran of Napoleon’s army, became the first person to combine optical properties of light with its chemical effects and preserve the results. To achieve this, the innovative Niepce had photographed a courtyard, perhaps not dissimilar to the one Albert was looking at now. Which was where, Albert knew, he would be shot. Dearest Priscilla, always with him yet lost to him in the mists of time. Not even her sketched memorial to comfort him now, as it had on so many horrendous occasions. Only she, would he miss. His comrades, he knew, had considered him to be rum fellow. Who else, they’d said, would smile at the sound of the dreaded Passchendaele name? Had she missed him ? he wondered. Had she too closed her eyes and felt the touch and smelled the scent? Perhaps now would be a good time to close the eyes and picture their very own passion-dale.
They came for Albert Fosdyke, young-old man, faithful lover and aspiring artist, at the dawn of a Passchendaele day upon which he wouldn’t see the sunset.
Extract from the London Times, May 20 th 1919.... An exhibition of wartime photography, sponsored by The Royal Army Medical Corps, is to be held at the Marshall Gallery on May 25 th . We understand the main feature will be the work of one the Corp’s own officers, a Captain Albert Fosdyke, who lost his life at Passchendaele. A spokesman for the RAMC has stated that Captain Fosdyke’s photographs managed to convey the spirit of what is honourable in mankind, even as it is confronted with its own inhumanity during times of conflict....
Extract from the London Times, June 30 th 1919... Lady Priscilla Holbrook,