Selected Ramblings

By Angus Mackintosh

A selection of short stories by Angus Mackintosh on a range of fictional subjects

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326418755

Book preview

Selected Ramblings

Selected Ramblings by Angus Mackintosh

Copyright

Copyright © 2015 by Angus Mackintosh

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: September 2015

St Algars Publishing

West Woodlands

Frome

Somerset

Brussels Sprouts, Pigeons and The Cold War

This is a story which at last I feel it is safe to tell without fear of being locked up for breaking the official secrets act.  It was told to me by a journalist friend who still feels honour bound not to go public with it, so I will refer to him as Gus Steadfast-Smythe, which gives the clue to his identity only to those who know the story already.

I do have to get a bit technical.   It involves the American’s early warning radar system, coal mines, pigeons and Brussels sprouts.  The espionage part involved MI 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, in that order; organisations which, for all I know, may not exist any more now the cold war is over.

Harry Hardcastle started the whole thing.  Poor Harry now spends all his time on his allotment and has even given up his pigeons after the trouble they got him into.  His nerves were pretty well shattered by his first accident, but Gus told me that his later experiences left him in a very bad way.

Harry lives up in the top right-hand corner of Yorkshire, and was a miner, but not any more.   He was an electrician, working down the mines, where there is more electrical work than you might think.  There is all the machinery for a start; and then as tunnels get extended, new lighting cables have to be installed, new ventilation fans, telephone cables and so on.  Electrical equipment down mines has to be specially insulated against the possibility of sparks causing an explosion. 

You will have heard all about the danger of gas in mines.  Methane seeps out of coal seams and can build up to dangerous levels.  But there is another source of the gas which people don’t like to talk about.

If you work long hours underground it is natural to have a hobby that takes you into the open air, and that is why miners have a tradition of being keen gardeners. If their back gardens aren’t big enough they have allotments, and being hard working chaps they don’t bother with flowers, but take great pride in their vegetables, and they like to boast about their produce.  Imagine a lot of men, all keen gardeners, all eating vast quantities of greens, working in a confined space with poor ventilation.  Well of course the atmosphere gets explosive.  Oh yes, that’s what it is.  Methane.  Pure CH⁴.

But to get back to Harry.  He was working on an electrical junction box in a new shaft with airtight doors on either side of him.  Harry had been working in this compartment for about two hours.   It was January; Harry had had a good crop of Brussels-sprouts which had had a bit of frost on them.  Any canary would have snuffed it long ago but miners don’t take canaries down the mine any more like they used to.  Harry carelessly tested a switch without putting on the airtight cover first and

GERBOOM!

That was the end of Harry’s career as a miner.  When he left hospital all his hair fell out as a result of the shock.  He tried doing domestic electrical work on a part-time basis, but he would get into a nervous state if he was in a confined situation and often jobs would involve working in people’s lofts or the cupboard under the stairs, so he had to give it up.  He devoted nearly all his time to his allotment and ate even greater quantities of vegetables.

The story really begins when Harry decided to keep racing pigeons.  He thought it would be a nice outdoor occupation, and he did have time on his hands.  He made a little pigeon loft in his back yard and bought himself a breeding pair.  Soon he had lots.  Pigeons are like that.

When you train racing pigeons you catch them up, put them in a crate, put the crate in the back of the car, drive half a mile down the road and let them out.  They circle round for a moment till they recognize the landscape, then fly straight back to their home loft.  Then you take them a mile; two miles, and so on; gradually getting them used to finding their way home.  At first they find their way purely by recognizing landmarks, but gradually, as the training flights are extended, they learn to use their other homing instincts.  In recent years it has been discovered that homing pigeons, and probably other migratory birds, are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field and find their way, almost as if they had a compass in their head, by following minute variations in the magnetic pattern and magnetic lines of force.  From now on this gets a bit technical.  Jump to the romantic ending if you must, but try and stay with me. 

Harry’s favourite trip, when he had his birds well trained, was to go way up onto the Yorkshire Moors.  The countryside was so beautiful and wild, he felt his pigeons must enjoy it too.  But he made a discovery which got him into a load of trouble.

Up there on the moors there are two enormous radar installations that are part of the American’s early warning system.  They sit up there on the hills looking like two great inter-galactic puff-balls, but inside the outer protective shell are enormously powerful radar transmitters which constantly scan the stratosphere from Murmansk to Minsk.  So sensitive are they that, more than once, world war three has nearly been started by a flock of cranes flying South from their breeding grounds in Northern Russia to their Winter quarters in North Africa.  There is nothing secret about these things of course, they dominate the countryside for miles around.

Down below the moors, inland from the resort of Scumbeach, there is an abandoned steel works.  It is a huge and unsightly industrial waste-land covering many acres.  Huge steel hoppers for coke and iron ore, conveyors, retorts, rolling-mills, abandoned railway trucks, cranes, all the paraphernalia of an enormous industrial complex.

Now, any large metal structure can act as a radio aerial.  Radio waves are bouncing around all over the place, but they are weak and not normally detectable, (except with a radio of course).   But this early warning radar is no ordinary transmitter.  It transmits a very powerful signal on a frequency not far off that used by a micro-wave oven.  You would be seriously damaged if you stood too close to it wearing metal jewellery.  So this old steelworks was collecting a considerable electrical charge from these radar signals, and being so extensive it was enough to create a small electro-magnetic distortion in the earth’s magnetic field in that locality.  Ah-ha! Now you see where this is leading.   Any pigeon flying near the old steelworks would be confused.

Harry had no trouble with his pigeons to start with, but as he took them further, but only further in one direction, he ran into problems.  He found that if he took them South of Scumbeach so that they had to fly near the old steelworks they got lost.  This is not uncommon of course.  Pigeons often do get lost, but the strange thing that Harry noticed was that his lost pigeons always turned up again on a Wednesday.  No matter what day he took them out and released them, from that particular direction, they would not turn up again till the next Wednesday, but if he released them on a Wednesday they went straight home without trouble.

Harry read up all he could about pigeons and he might never have solved the problem if he had not been an electrician.   He understood all about radio waves, electro-magnetic fields, induced currents, static charges and so on.  (I don’t).  Sitting up on the moors with a view of the early-warning radar behind him, the derelict steelworks down below and the town of Scumbeach a faint smudge in the distance; watching the six pigeons he had just released circling round, it suddenly all came clear to him, and he said out loud to himself So they turn those things off every Wednesday.  By gum.  Fancy that.

The pigeons circled, gaining height, then not recognizing the countryside, they read the lines of magnetic force and headed North in a straight line for Harry’s village twenty miles away.  But as they flew near the old steelworks they veered to the East and eventually settled on a window ledge of a boarding-house in Gormley Road, Scumbeach; their magnetic sense telling them that that is where they should be.

Our destinies are often shaped by pure chance.  The landlady of the boarding-house where the pigeons always landed up when diverted by the magnetic warp was a kindly soul.  She chucked crumbs out of the window when she saw the pigeons in her back yard but it never occurred to her to wonder where they came from or where they went. .  But she had a lodger who was much more curious.

The one and only cultural event in the yearly life of Scumbeach was the pantomime, and the girl playing the leading role was staying at this boarding-house in Gormley Road.  Her name was Sherry Lee Gilpic, but not liking the Gilpic much she used Sherry Lee as her stage name.  She never played the principal boy, she was far too petite and feminine for that.  The pantomime that year was Cinderella, and that was her.  She had first made her name as a dancer but she could sing pretty well too.  She was a gorgeous girl and better than Scumbeach deserved.  She had long dark hair which hung down to her waist and gave her a wild gypsy quality when she danced, and then in quiet mood, with her waif-like, delicate features she could bring tears to the eyes of even a Scumbeach audience. 

Sherry Lee was curious about these tame pigeons that turned up on her window sill one evening.  She asked the landlady if they belonged to her husband, but no; nobody kept pigeons in Gormley Road, she was told.

But they must belong to someone.  Look, they’ve got rings on their legs she said.

You may be right Pet said the landlady, who really wasn’t at all interested.

But they may be lost Sherry persisted.  Shouldn’t we find out who they belong to and let them know?

The landlady obviously thought this was a daft idea, but she liked Sherry so she just said Oh I shouldn’t worry Love.  They come and go.  Pigeons always find their way home don’t they.

But Sherry was soppy about animals as only a city dweller can be, and she had quite a lot of spare time.   She didn’t know how to go about finding the owner of the pigeons, so she rang the local RSPCA office, and they gave her the name of the local Racing Pigeon Club.   The first question was, what is the number on the ring.   Of course she didn’t know.   From her room she could see the small group of pigeons on the garage roof.   She opened her window and sprinkled some crumbs onto the outside ledge.  Soon a couple came over and pecked at the bait.  One bird seemed much tamer than the others and she managed to coax it into the room.   In colouring it stood out from the others, being predominantly white with pinky-brown mottling.  As it pecked at some crumbs on the little table by the window she gently shut the window behind it.  It was then an easy matter to catch it when it fluttered against the glass as it tried to join its mates outside.

She read the number on the metal ring round its leg and noted it down.  She rang the Pigeon Racing Club secretary again.  She was in luck, he said, it was a local member, and he gave her Harry Hardcastle’s address, but he wasn’t on the phone.  Can you please get a message to him, she asked .   She imagined the owner dropping everything and hurrying