Introduction
Welcome to the eleventh Thursday Night Group Anthology. This is a collection of their short stories or poems written during 2010.
No theme has been set for this anthology and no strict editorial filter has been imposed on any of the submissions. We hope this has delivered a wide variety of styles and subjects and preserved the original freshness of the writing.
We hope you enjoy the stories as much as we have enjoyed writing them.
Crossing Over
By The Thursday Night Group
Published by Gooseberry Hill Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Individual Authors
Jim Arthur, Carol Astbury, Des Burge, Susan Carameli, Dan Ellis-Jones, Phil Mayne, Victoria Mizen, Tim Nelson, Chris Oakeley, Chris Palazzolo, Danika Potter, Deb Ratcliffe
This book is available in print at
The Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre
kspf@iinet.net.au
Smashwords Edition,
License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by these authors. Thank you for your support.
Contents
St Symphorien, Mons
The Interview
Money-grubbers Poem
When the River Comes
Ever
Whisper in The Wild
Negative Thoughts
Madagascan Memoir
To Hell and Back
The Fountain of Youth
Peninsula Flats
Philosophy 881
Celibate
High Tea One
Cold Hands
The Bombers
Villers-Bretonneux
St Symphorien, Mons
Carol Astbury
Along the verdant pathways
Meandering ‘cross hillocks and leafy glades,
The murmurs of foes long past
Tease the tall red poppies.
Beyond; the ancient city, draped
In modernity; industrial mammoths
Grey in the distance, belch fumes
Into the same still air.
Here, it’s said, the first and last
Lay side by side – a curious consolation.
Who will remember these brave legions?
With only the wind to mimic their cries.
The first and last:
The first: Private John Parr, killed 21st August 1914 aged 20.
The last: Private George Ellison, killed 11th November 1918 aged 27.
The Interview
Chris Oakeley
It is 1964 and Archie has been to dozens of interviews recently. His problem is that he has a mixed Arts degree but wants a job that is both exciting and new – and preferably something scientific or technical. He’s turned down offers in the colonial police force (Don’t people realise that the British Empire is dead?), selling insurance, or starting from the bottom in a steel mill (‘Where there’s muck, there’s money’ the interviewer had said), but these industries seemed unaware of how comparatively modern and efficient the Japanese had become – and many more that would condemn him to a life of routine or pointlessness in one of England’s decaying industries.
His umbrella protects him from the fine drizzle as he walks along the pavement between a line of red brick, soot-stained worker houses and the railway from Turnham Green station to another interview. He’s fond of his old school umbrella with a gold band engraved with his name and is wearing his graduation suit, and has polished the heels of his black leather shoes (His mother says heels tell a lot about a man). He steps towards the kerb to allow a rotund figure to pass in the opposite direction, a small man, half way to being a dwarf, with a grey waistcoat bulging inside a pin striped suit. Archie looks over his shoulder as he passes and notices the little man has forgotten to pull his trouser braces over his shoulders to fasten them at the front. They dangle like twin tails behind him.
He counts the paving stones. There are ninety-four between the station and the footbridge that crosses the railway line into a laneway between two factory buildings. A chap at the Alpine Club claims that if he can walk across one hundred slabs, taking only one breath, he is acclimatised to 10,000 feet. Archie is not visiting the Alps for a while so he breathes normally. He realises he faces a future of only two weeks’ holiday a year but he is resigned to that fate. He can’t be a student for ever, and there are a lot of summits around the world he can conquer in two weeks with a bit of careful planning – not Everest of course; he’d have to get leave of absence for that. Besides, he is trying to breathe normally to lessen his nervousness at the thought of the impending interview.
The hum of machinery increases as he crosses the bridge over the railway. Planes rumble and whine overhead with their wheels down on their way to Heathrow airport. He walks along the lane to a door between two large plate windows displaying samples of motor parts, fuel pumps and pictures of trucks. He pushes inside to a corridor-like office where a smell of Duckham’s lubricating oil assaults his nose so strongly he wants to sneeze. A smile greets him, from a girl with blond hair and white arms trimmed with frilly sleeves – a lonely patch of colour, youth and fashion in this wasteland of decrepitude and ugliness.
He fills in forms and sits on a plastic chair at the end of the corridor. The door beside him opens. A man in a black suit and white shirt and regimental tie stands in the doorway and beckons him inside with a lift of his eyebrows and a tilt of his head. Archie enters, and the regimental tie closes the door behind him.
‘Have you used one of these lifts before?’ the regimental tie asks.
Archie hasn’t. He has never seen such a contraption, or even knew such things existed. In front of him are twin open lift shafts. Rising up the right hand shaft is a continuous column of seven foot tall wooden boxes, open in front and without doors. A similar column of boxes is descending down the left hand one.
‘Never,’ he says.
‘It’s called a Paternoster. Stand by the right ones. Jump in with me when I tell you, and move to the back. Right? Ready? After me! Now!’
Archie makes a big step after him through the right hand opening into a upward moving box, and a second step to the back, his knees bending as he adjusts to its speed. The box shudders and rumbles as if to acknowledge his intrusion but makes no break in its upward motion.
‘Turn around. Keep your hands away from the open front. We get off on the next floor.’
The first floor carpet appears above him and travels down the opening.
‘You right? Now.’
Archie steps off. He is in a brightly lit open office containing double rows of desks, and heads that stretch into the distance. Glass offices line one side. The Paternoster continues to move and rumble sky-wards behind him.
‘Latin for ‘Our Father’, the first two words of the Lord's Prayer,’ says the regimental tie. ‘The lift goes round in a loop like a string of rosary beads. No one’s been killed on this one yet, though only heaven knows why not. This way. The person you are going to meet is called Jim Fraser.’
Archie is ushered into one of the offices. Jim Fraser is seated; leaning back, presenting Archie with his profile, and does not get up. Jim Fraser’s eyes dart between Archie and a file that is raised at an angle in front of him.
‘Please take a seat.’
Archie sits on an office chair that is both comfortable and modern and which positions their heads at the same level. Jim Fraser’s hair is swept back from his forehead and close cropped at the back and sides. Jim Fraser pauses for a full minute, then introduces himself and starts the interview.
‘Why do you want a career in computing?’
Archie knows the answer to that. He mostly tells lies at this point as he is usually not interested in the job he is supposedly seeking, but this one he wants. Besides, his mother has taken to leaving advertisements in his room for apprenticeships and office boys, and so she must be getting desperate for him to leave home to stand on his own feet, a feeling that is mutual. Archie has come prepared.
‘I think it is going to change the way everything is done in future and I would like to play a part in it, be in from the beginning of this technology,’ he says. ‘I’ve actually built a computer,’ he continues. ‘It was a simple one and experimental. It was one that learnt to play noughts and crosses. I read your advertisement. It sounded exciting and involved project work and it is just what I would like to do.’
‘Could it beat you at noughts and crosses?’
‘Eventually, after about fifteen games, depending on who was playing against it, and who started.’
It was a wonderful device, and really worked, but he doesn’t go on to explain that it was made from nine matchboxes and a gross of coloured beads, copied from an idea in the Scientific American, and luckily Jim Fraser doesn’t ask. Archie is not sure whether the interviewer thinks he is being flippant.
‘Do you have any management or project experience?’
They all ask that; expect to hear he has been secretary of the Student’s Union – they didn’t have one at his University – or raised money for OXFAM, or worked in a shop. He had been a bank guard for two weeks until he was asked to clean the floors, and that was the sum of his work experience.
‘Well .. you can see from my CV that I was president of the mountaineering club and have organised two major expeditions while at University, one to Patagonia and one for two months to North East Greenland. That required writing hundreds of letters to get sponsorship in the way of food, money and equipment, and organising transport.’
Jim Fraser seems satisfied and reads the next question off the file in his hands.
‘This work requires people who can pay great attention to detail. Can you demonstrate any aptitude in that regard?’
Archie had never thought about such matters, merely having concentrated on whatever had to be done at the time – handing in assignments, staying alive in the mountains, mowing the lawn, finishing a marathon, trying not to get upset with parents fussing about him not getting a job, understanding girls.