[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":81},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-a-state-of-war":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":68,"description":69,"edited":70,"extension":71,"meta":72,"navigation":73,"path":74,"seo":75,"stem":77,"tags":78,"__hash__":80},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fa-state-of-war.md","A State of War",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":64},"minimark",[9,13,16,19,22,25,28,31,34,37,40,43,46,49,52,55,58,61],[10,11,12],"p",{},"That shameless beggar, Heloise, my cat of many years, has begun to wheedle at me from the kitchen. She is without two legs, one fore and one aft, but I suspect her of contriving their absence by some artful device, so as to play a mournful song on my tender heartstrings. I have certainly seen her with four legs. If she had not four, how would she leap? How would she bound? It must be four, two is a lie. But let her wheedle a while longer. ",[10,14,15],{},"As I was saying, matters had come to something of a tête between myself and shift manager Crenshaw, and as it was so roughly put in the official correspondence, my employment in the refuse collection department had been terminated. I was to return my overalls and hi-vis immediately.",[10,17,18],{},"Without the ballast of my employment, I was as lost as a roving tern, that solitary pilot who commands the ceaseless seas. As I lay upon my eiderdown, before my eyes there formed once more the stilly pre-dawn setting of the waste depo. Let me sound its roll of honour; “Uncle” Dave Medlar, he could lob a black back into the lorries maw like a discus thrower hurling his load from the plate. In my mind he sat once more in the cab, plumes of smoke and vapour curling from his silk cut and his macchiato. “Pangolin” Pete Higgins, supine over three plastic chairs, his arms crossed over his chest, as usual pretending to be dead. “Ordinance” Foster, limping like a stricken frigate, one leg lost in the compactor and the other viciously squashed to the proportions of a door-wedge. The rest of the crew; The Commissar, Muckle Jones, Fridge Magnet, Kentish Saunders, Bastard Phil. Ubi sunt. We may not see their like again. Ahem. Despite the arid waste of my solitude, the gates to pastures new had ope’d. I had now the requisite time and energy to turn to my neglected calling. My task comprised the production of a definitive edition of The Proceedings of the Proceeding Society, an immense and singular meisterwerk in fifty-five volumes, the life’s project of my great uncle Bartle.",[10,20,21],{},"Sergeant-Major Bartle “Shirt-Stud” Pastoon, my relative, served with the Gloucestershire Yeomanry in the Great War, and gave battle like an Alexander, from Mons to the rolling up of the Hindenburg Line. Bartle was an autodidact of great ability. Exempli gratia the famous letter which his commanding officer, The Rt Honourable Sir Percival “Googly” Fitzsimmons, wrote to The Times during a lull in the Battle of Bazentin Ridge. Sir Percival records his unalloyed astonishment at the alacrity with which the then Lance-Corporal Pastoon mastered the recondite Swabian argot spoken by the opposing troops. This feat he achieved purely by ear and without reference to any lexicon. Bartle made use of his ungrammatical fluency to upbraid the 59th Swabian Fusiliers between shell busts, expanding at length on their female kin’s unnatural passions for animal husbandry, delivered in his penetrating basso profundo. So vicious were his intimations and so precise his command of the curious inverse umlaut typical of the dialects of Upper Swabia, that several Germans came over at once with raised hands. The documentary products of his learning are no less worthy of merit. I have before me his monograph on the stilt dwelling pygmy-elks of the Canadian interior, compiled during his time as a timber merchant entre les guerres. These grotesque creatures are only two foot high but extremely wide, rather like a flat fish, but with fully sized antlers. This makes the use of stilts crucial for reasons of balance. Bartle’s diagrammatical renderings of these dwarfish elks deploying roughly gnawed pine stilts to navigate rivers in spate, or in one astonishing passage, as lances in combat with a tribe of First Nations trappers, are some of the most singular passages in whole of The Proceedings.",[10,23,24],{},"The first and loftier aim of The Proceedings is to record Uncle Bartles utopic vision of what he called “The Pro-ceeding Society”, which is to the say the society which will proceed and replace our own. I have not the space to render the lavish hues of his vision, but but in brief he would be the only person allowed to eat sausages or use an indoor toilet, and would issue stamps bearing pictures of his pet whelk Fortinbras Wibble. Of the fifty-five volumes, seventeen are devoted to an eye watering and lavishly illustrated account of the arrangements for his harem once installed in the position of Uber-Archon. The secondary aim of The Proceedings is more pedestrian. It is a record of all the proceedings which Bartle thought worthy of merit. As He was not a man who suffered from a lack of amour propre, he near-as-damn-it recorded his every thought, however fleeting, nonsensical or criminal. It is a rather silly book, all in all.",[10,26,27],{},"The essential point is that my editorial task was as dense as a thicket before a grail knight and required the utmost quiet and concentration. Two people made this impossible: Captain Toby and Fraulein Margrave. I must make clear that Terpischore Terrace where I abide, was built by the John Wayne of cowboy builders. The landlord describes himself in his correspondence as a Properti Magnet (sic). The slightest noise sounds in your ear with crystal quality.",[10,29,30],{},"One Monday, as I made a sortie for a quadruple pack of Silk Cut, two home removal vans trundled up to the opposing ends of the street, in unison turned the corner, and faced off with engines gently revving, like desperados at high noon. Finally, one van took the initiative and moved into the only available parking spot. From the passenger door hopped a woman of around seventy, whom I would soon know to be the formidable Fraulein Margrave. She was wearing a heavy maroon coat buttoned firmly to her chin and a pair of bright green leather gloves, with a fur hat crammed onto her head. She was exceedingly tall and long limbed and swung herself lithely from the cab with the grace of a gibbon. From the other van emerged a squat, compressed looking man, dressed in so astonishingly nautical a costume that he gave the impression of having fled from a piece of light entertainment. He wore a pea coat, sea boots and sported an abundance of grey beard. His powerful jaw masticated on the nib of briar pipe, as if teething, this was Captain Toby.",[10,32,33],{},"From the offing it was clear the two were natural enemies, as the mongoose is to the serpent. The Captain immediately began to bawl “get on yer way!” and produce unprintable obscenities, at which the Frauline leapt up and down in paroxysms of rage, suggesting in stentorian tones some alternative uses for his pipe. She hoisted out her driver and set him to immediate work unloading her possessions. An inordinate amount of junk appeared, culminating in a portable organ, painted garishly and with a range of porcelain song-birds affixed to the ends of the pipes. During this disembarkation Captain Toby roared and stamped like a sou’wester. When his own driver finally threatened to leave, he advanced on the Fraulein with a warriors’ light in his eye. She whirled to meet him head on, he ducked under her outstretched finger with a neat inside roll, which I thought for a moment he intended to follow with a sharp left hook. I think probably he was very drunk on a bottle of Kriegsmarine Rhum, which I would learn later he was rarely without, so he mistimed his action and ended indecorously in the gutter. The Fraulein pounced onto the stricken mariner like a jungle cat, with cries of:",[10,35,36],{},"“How dare you strike at my organ! You luddite! You philistine! How dare you!” She got in a sly headbutt to press the point home.",[10,38,39],{},"“Avast ye you loon!” Shouted the beleaguered Captain in return, his eye swelling nicely, and attempted a rather nifty wrist lock to evade her probing nails. He claimed to have picked up this trick while a trainee judoka in an Osakan dojo. In fact, he had run a fish and chip shop in Rill and was famed for his wrathful ejections of the bibulous. Their wrestle was becoming rather serious, and surely the constabulary would soon arrive, so I betook myself to The Winkle and Shaft for a few pints of brown ale. On my return, both combatants where inside with their possessions. When I entered my own abode, it was to a silence like that which falls between the chimes of a clock, only gathering itself for noise renewed. We were in a state of war.",[10,41,42],{},":paragraph-spacer",[10,44,45],{},"Before I attempt to sketch a history of this conflict, bitter as those between Rome and Carthage, as bloody as civil strife, as protracted as a siege, a brief note on the combatants. Firstly, the minds of both had been unseamed by drink and delusion. Well, it is not the worst of faults, and these are hard times after all. Fraulein Margrave made her crust from the provision of piano and organ lessons. She had a vigorous churn of students as she would insist on their perfecting a cycle of Luxembourgish Milchleider, songs sung by the farmers as they tended to their cows. These are extremely fast, technically challenging, and largely indistinguishable. Captain Toby told me that he lived solely from his merchant navy pension. He was vague on the precise nature of his naval service. He had, he told me many times, “been behind the mast” and “knew a thing or three about sailin ‘n then some.” In his cups he would recount that he had seen things “as queer as a six-legged goose and twice as rum” with produced a certain nautical frisson without contributing a great deal by way of detail.",[10,47,48],{},"Captain Toby was extremely fond of spirits, and as a result he was very un-fond of noise, until at least he had manged a lunchtime nip to “get ‘er back on an even keel.” But Fraulein Margrave liked to do her drinking in the afternoon, when she had dismissed her last student with a vigorous shake of the head and settled down for a glass of bitter alpine schnaps. The sound of vigorous Luxumbourgish tunes, the shouts of objection and correction, the tears of dejected pupils, these did nothing for Captain Toby’s hangover. This went on for months. He stumped downstairs to roar objections, he played his collection of naval hymns at extraordinary volumes, he reported her flat to the council as the site of immoral earnings. All to no avail. Until the start of what proved an extremely warm June, when the Fraulein was obliged to keep her window during her lessons. In the middle of a particularly recondite passage, her present student rose with a stilted shriek, pointed once at the window and collapsed. Margrave was about to poor cold coffee on the weakling and probably put the boot in when an awful noise sounded through the room. It was a meld of death, terror and retribution, and with unbelieving eyes the Fraulein saw the inverted head of a terrible metal dragon, or wyrm, inverted and thrust down through the window. Somehow, Captain Toby had acquired a twenty-foot bronze carnyx, or Celtic war horn. As Polybius informs us this was used by woad painted loons to terrify their opponents in battle.",[10,50,51],{},"The deployment of the carnyx marked an escalatory point in the conflict. At the slightest noise from below, down he would thrust its terrible head, away would flee the screaming pupil, and his enemy was deprived of contentment and income both. The Fraulein had to respond and respond she did. Captain Toby was both incredibly superstitious, and profoundly anxious, largely due to his staggering ingestion of rum. He lived in total fear of ghosts and spectres and carried on his person innumerable totems and trinkets from far flung shores. Captain Toby rather thought the battle was going his way after his innovation of the carnyx. Sure, of his newfound technological supremacy, he cornered me and the Fraulein in the corridor one day and subjected us to a long and involuted lecture on the threat posed by spectral apparitions. He showed off us numerous limbs in various stages of decay and separated from small animals that he kept on as protective charms. As you imagine he stank and was badly troubled by gulls.",[10,53,54],{},"That evening, I was woken to the sounds of terrified screaming from the captain’s flat above me, and the patter of fleeing feet. I found him knelt on both knees in the attitude of a supplicant, and in a state of gibbering fear. After his tears had stopped and I had prized the rum bottles out of both hands, he relayed between spiritous belches that he had been visited by his late mother wearing an exiguous shift, who had cursed his easy living and disturbance of his neighbours and promised foul tortures unless he mended his ways. Of course, he swore to heed her words and promised to reform. Until the next morning when he awoke to the effects of the rum, reached for the carnyx, and, well I think you can see the problem.",[10,56,57],{},"An impasse had been reached, he could stymie her lessons at will with his fearful bronze war horn, and she could reduce him to a state of weeping terror. This morning, I finally brought both parties together in the signing of a formal accord to secure the cessation of hostilities. They sat across the dinner table from each other, my bumblebee pattern tablecloth listless in the breeze, two equals worn down to the point mutual surrender. They could go on, expending their final reserves of physical and psychical strength, but they saw this road for what it was, a black and gibbetted highway to wrack, ruin, and utter despair. Captain Toby agreed to surrender his carnyx, the naughty man. In the mouth of the dragon, I keep peonies. Fraulein Margrave swore to abstain from all occult practices and especially, the good Captain insisted on this wording, “from callin up any of em grisly old uns” (sic). In the armistice spirit the Fraulein came clear that of course all had been a sham, she had simulated the visitations. This nearly derailed the negotiations entirely as he took this to be another one of her “witchy tricks”, and he was only supplicated when she burned a suitably old book outside near the bins, like Prospero breaking his staff. I think in fact this was an old copy of Mrs Beeton with the title faded beyond legibility, but he was content.",[10,59,60],{},"The ink is scarcely dry on the treaty I have before me. The night gathers. Will peace, unweened, yet hold? I pray to God it will, and that my labours with The Proceedings will fructify.",[10,62,63],{},"Arnold Pastoon.",{"title":65,"searchDepth":66,"depth":66,"links":67},"",2,[],"2026-03-18","That shameless beggar, Heloise, my cat of many years, has begun to wheedle at me from the kitchen. ","2026-03-19","md",{},true,"\u002Fstories\u002Fa-state-of-war",{"title":5,"description":76},"Extract from the journal of Arnold Pastoon.","stories\u002Fa-state-of-war",[79],"Satire","_7RApEjX-JHE4V8G9TxDGS-WOGhQn7bIZ2FxmSfv0KQ",1793724018838]