Schemes and Boats and Cranes

Mason Penn

Description

This book has no literary pretensions, put together too hurriedly by an impatient old git who could have padded it out Dickens style or in the manner of Hardy's The Well-Beloved. It reflects a time when the Battle of Britain was won, the bombing had eased a fair bit and life, although grey and monotonous with the ever present queues for food, was showing the first signs of normalisation. This despite heavy militarisation leading up to D Day. Homosexuality was scorned by the judgemental masses and severely punished by the military. It was rarely despised by the non-parochial or the intelligent and the real heroine and heroes were of the type who would resist the disparagement or ill treatment of their fellows. They often needed courage to do so. In another sphere the irrational, spiteful treatment of foreigners, even refugees, conditioned the author to write of events that seared his mind as a youngster. Like most novels, I suspect that fiction has a certain amount of experience involved in its fabric and certainly the events described could have happened.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789019124
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 Mason Penn

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.


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ISBN 978 1789019 124

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Dedicated with love to Jackie, Chris and Peter
to whom I owe so much.
Acknowledgement


To my good friend Joan Williams, my thanks for kindly restoring faith in myself with her advice and encouragement in compiling this book.
Contents
Author’s Foreword


T’e Prison Graduate
A story of human kindness.


Curtiss
A tale of deep friendship forged in the aftermath of war.


Triple Hazard Golfing
Author’s Foreword
This book of fiction centres mainly on Portland in Dorset and locals will know the place names, if not the times to which the tales relate. Portlanders will also recognise ‘Big Dick’ as being akin to Nicodemus Knob and will hopefully forgive its transposition from a couple of hundred yards south of the eastern end of the Verne moat, to the cliff-edge of what I knew as Shepherds Dinner quarry, high above Durdle Pier.
If one views old prints of this unique tombolo, it is plain to see that, where cliffs once rose out of the sea, massive change has been wrought particularly on its eastern side where some six million tons of stone were extracted to create Portland Harbour. Hundreds of yards of westward encroachment was necessary along much of the eastern seaboard to effect this great engineering feat. This, at least, gave years of meaningful employment to the convicts of that era.
The north to south gently sloping farmland has also been ravaged by quarrying. I liken Portland stone to a thick marzipan on the tilted ‘Portland Cake’, where, of its desirable delights quarry owners and governments have voraciously partaken with minimal heed to aesthetic considerations.
Nevertheless its wild weares and beaches were a wonderful healthy playground for children and youth before the technological age.

T’e Prison Graduate
A story of human kindness.
Chapter 1
Situated near the high cliffs on the eastern aspects of the rocky “Isle of Portland” overlooking Weymouth Bay is Portland Borstal, as it was known in 1943.
The main gates in the perimeter building facing south opened and a dozen young prisoners, in three abreast formal marching order, exited accompanied by two officers bringing up the rear. They turned left, walking past the governor’s residence opposite, and followed a meandering route past the side of warders’ housing before arriving at the main gardens. These were fairly extensive, running south from the rear of the governor’s house and east to within a couple of yards of the precipitous east cliff wall. A low wall had been built on that side of the gardens and a public footpath, some six feet wide, separated the two. The garden enclosure contained a bowling green in pristine condition only yards from the cliff.
Liam Riley was in the garden squad. As a trusted prisoner he was allowed to work outside the main complex in whatever role that was assigned to him on “Crown” property. Liam was twenty and was from the Irish Republic. He had been unemployed, had no nationalistic inclinations and was strongly opposed to Hitler’s psycho attacks on innocent, peaceful countries. He’d joined the British Army six months ago through a mixture of idealism and a desire to do something with his life. Things had gone badly wrong. He’d indulged in homosexual activities, had been discovered, court martialled and had a long sentence. His trustee status had been instigated in order to ‘protect’ him.
Liam was in a state of nervous suppressed excitement. Today he was planning to escape but he knew he’d have to be patient, it couldn’t happen until 4 p.m.
Three weeks prior to the planned big day, he’d been detailed with three others to take a stretcher down to an escaped prisoner who had attempted the descent of the cliff, circa eighty feet, by using a hosepipe as a rope. The hose had been attached to a weighty lawn mower which, with the aid of an accomplice, when the nearest officer had been distracted by someone having an ‘accident’ in the large greenhouse, had been heaved over the gardens wall. The pair had swiftly thrown the hosepipe over the cliff wall from the little used public path and one had descended.
It had been an unintelligent and foolhardy undertaking. The lad, just eighteen, had successfully negotiated the vertical drop to the farthest extent of the hose, only to find that he was fifteen feet short of a landing on the narrow rarely used path at the foot of the cliff. His dilemma was quickly solved by the hose parting on the ridged coping at the top of the cliff wall. His cries of distress as his accomplice viewed the ruptured hose in dismay, had resulted in a quick confession and a rapidly formed rescue party. The lad was discovered with a broken ankle and minus one shoe.
Liam had been one of the four rescuers. Accompanied by an officer who was familiar with the local terrain, the party had walked circa three hundred yards to the south along the cliff edge to where the cliff disappeared into the upwardly extended escarpment dropping away from a working quarry. At the very end of the cliff there was a huge slightly rounded split in the rock leaving a massive rod of stone circa seven feet in rough diameter.
They had scrambled down the stony slope skirting the base of the craggy phallus. Here Liam had noted some undercutting at the base and he could just discern the rounded soft ridges of an ammonite, although he did not know what it was. They had back-tracked to the casualty. ‘Where’s your shoe?’ The officer had asked. The guy had pointed upward to his shoe, which was hanging from a tiny stunted shrub on a narrow projection. Liam had volunteered to climb the ten-foot ascent to retrieve the shoe and had discovered a small cave, which could not be seen from directly below. He did not reveal his discovery. Almost directly below the quarry he had noted the small jetty with two boats located at the base of the gradually flattening escarpment, the rocky line of which was only broken by the railway track skirting the cliffs on a gradual upward gradient to Easton. An idea had sparked in his mind.
Liam had never smoked and his meagre financial allowance was now used to buy food articles from other inmates. He particularly demanded bully beef tins, which had a key attached to them, or tinned milk. He obtained two of each. One or two of the brighter lads were quick to cotton on and were helpful in obtaining these items, which were smuggled out and dropped over the cliffs wall at the point where the casualty had occurred. Liam’s plan was to escape by running, hopefully undetected, to that lonely spot and holing up in the protection of the cave for four days when he knew from prison gossip that the causeway to Weymouth road block would be lifted. Unless there were local burglaries the assumption would be that the escaper had reached the mainland. Local searches would thus be relaxed.
Observation of the officers’ routines played an important part of his plan. He noted that the younger officer peeled away to his quarters immediately after they had formed up for the return trip to the prison, and that the older one tended to get slightly forward of the rear trio of prisoners as they walked round the first corner of the walled route back.
On the day, two prisoners ‘in the know’, had smuggled out packets of biscuits and secreted them in a safe, handy place on his flight route. A sharp six-inch nail was included in the stash. Liam also smuggled out a bag of oats mixed with sugar. Some old hessian sacks had also been dropped over the cliff at convenient moments.
Came assembly time and they started the march back to the main gate. True to form, one officer peeled away, returning to his house. The older warder, nearing retirement, assumed his usual position slightly forward of the back trio as they turned the first corner. Liam slipped away. Even if he was missed he had four minutes where the solitary officer would be unable to report the matter before they would be counted in at the gate.
He ran the few yards to the garden gates and was quickly over them. Retrieving the rations bag, he vaulted the low garden wall and hurtled along the clifftop path, which opened onto an open field to his right, hoping that he wouldn’t meet any locals along the cliff edge walk. He was lucky and the quarrymen, starting to walk home, were facing away from him as he slowed, diving down the slope, skirting the phallus and making his way back under the cliff where he recognised the projection and climbed to the safety of the cave. He was grateful that it was warm, dry and uninhabited by anything other than a couple of spiders.
The weather had been warm and sunny and as dusk approached he would search for the sacks and tinned food. Water was no problem; there were numerous springs from water seeping d