The Rhyming Cutlets of Pirip

By Bill Reed

We cannot blame Charles Dickens for not meeting our national Arts treasure Philip P. Pirip, but:
go blame yr rottern Fate;
whos flushs beat yr faces straights
It could be said, though, Dickens did lend his major characters to Philip P. Pirip, although ‘lend’ might not be the best word; rather freedom opened the door to its wide-open spaces to allow them to escape and give vent to their grievances with their famous author, seeing as to how he never once mentioned the fabulous Surnevv diamonds that they once had their hands on and now wanted back at whatever cost to literature.
Fabulous royalties might have been Charles Dickens’s lot but the diamonds were the only avenue for riches beyond creative writing for Miss Haversham, Estella, Mister Jaggers, Compeyson, Orlick, Biddy and a whole cast of actors and naked ‘actrusses’ who now demanded their jewel dues and were willing to kill for them.
That escape fell to them after ‘Great Expectations’ found its way onto one of the heaps in the rubbish tip that was beloved of Pirip and in fact the location of his Tiphome, a dump in itself. From that fact, it was only a short fictional distance for the Dickens’s characters to land on Pirip’s lap with a vengeance.
They came to lap
but I stukk out tongue, ‘take thapt’!
How our hero struggles with them might not be in any universal history books but, in artistic circles, it set the standard for the license to cull.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Reed
• Release date: Mar 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780648764182

Book preview

Reed Independent publishers, Australia, [e-mail]

This is a Smashwords edition

Printed by the Ingram Content Group

This paperback and ebook are available from most leading retail and/or online outlets.

hardback ISBN 9780648764175

paperback: ISBN 9780648764168

ebook: ISBN 9780648764182

Copyright © Bill Reed 2021

Cover illustration: figure, Sam Weller by ‘Kid’ (Joseph Clayton Clark), wikipedia.org; anvil and balloon, Vectorstock.com 28304263; syringe and hand, Dreamstime.com

A catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Sumer is icumen in

Lhude sing cucu!

Groweth sed an bloweth med

And springth the wude nu

(13th Century Anon.)

I loave a sunbaned cuntree

Whose fleese is wight as snow

And evverywhere that I romed free

The lam was on the go

(Phillip P. Pirip,‘Cruizing Down the Carnal’, 21st century)

contents

Deck’d out

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

chatper 15

chapter 16

Pip pip

Also by Bill Reed

About the author

Deck’d Out

(In the execution of these Papers, we have followed the author’s writing to the letter, save for wholesale bowdlerizing of it into some semblance of readable English that makes sense, while remaining true to his iconoclastic intentions, very elastic.

But this has been no mean task. After all, doesn’t the output of Philip P. Pirip ask of us all: ‘What is speling?; what is grammer?; what is litrure?; what be lit that don’t enflame?; what is the correctal way of doing things?; what be passed and what be parsed?; in the first moment of berth, dost we throe up or throw back?’

One could also authoritatively attest for the first time – and so we do here-and-now -- that the Philip P. Pirip ‘Papers’ derived from the author coming across the name of Charles Dickens -- ‘a’, to quote Philip P. Pirip reverently, ‘fair dicken Pommy with distink Pirip inspirations on board, as the stoker says to his boiler-mates before he perspired’. Ed)

The Japanese air raid on 3 March 1942 left Broome and Australia itself badly shaken.

At dawn on the same morning, a Dutch DC3 left Bandung in Java with a load of refugees. Just before take-off the White Russian pilot Feodor Surnevv was handed a parcel containing approximately one million dollars’ worth (even then) of cut and polished diamonds. In today’s market, their worth would be fabulous.

The Japanese Zeros were leaving Broome after their devastating first attack on the Australian mainland and were returning north. By a terrible twist of fate, the Zeros and the DC3 passed each other over Carnot Bay, on the northwest Australian coast.

The Zeros swept down and machine bullets ripped through the cabin and one engine. A bullet lodged in the co-pilot’s leg and Captain Surnevv felt another pierce his thigh. (If either had survived as rumoured, he would have thereafter suffered a permanent limp.) Even as the DC3 dropped out of the sky, the Zeros continued their attack on the civilian aircraft, killing four people, including a young woman and her baby, and wounding everyone else.

As for the diamonds, only the then equivalent of $40,000 was ever recovered. The fate of the rest of the gems has remained a mystery.

There have, of course, been many rumours. One of the most persistent of these had a beachcomber with the reputed initials of M. M. coming across the crashed plane and finding the diamonds in a package that was addressed to the Reserve Bank of Australia. He packed the diamonds in pepper and salt shakers and, after shaking out a few to his friends, left the area. Some said he then enlisted in the army.

One must remember that this was a chaotic time in the far North-west. Australia was trying desperately to gather its almost non-existent defenses for a coming Japanese invasion.

Soon after, presumably, the Dutch Consul and a one Sergeant Cliche managed to organise a gang of men to pull the wreckage from the surf. They located the Royal Mail box the package had been in, but no diamonds. The detective was also supposed to have discovered a hiding place where there was only one small diamond left in an old petrol tin. Shortly after, he then supposedly moved his inquiries to Perth, where, but unlikely to be connected, a Chinese shopkeeper had tried to sell diamonds worth $20,000 around the time a train cleaner had found a matchbox containing two diamonds seeming dropped from nowhere and stuck with grains of pepper and salt. The train cleaner took these with a pinch. Today, the diamonds are all but forgotten. Were they predominantly lost in the original wreckage? Were they stolen and long ago absorbed into the world’s diamond markets? Or are they, as the folklore of the Northwest would have it, still waiting to be unearthed?

(Since the uncovering of the ‘Papers’ of Philip P. Pirip, the true story of the diamonds and their place in Australian literature can be told. Yet, however fabulous a wealth the diamonds could be worth today compared to that of Australian aforesaid literature, no one could have dreamt that the gems would become the root cause of international intrigue, espionage, depravity, murder and corruption in high places. Ed)

chapter 1

(Good morning birds,

Goodday to you flowers

Hello nature tis I

I see tis been raining for hours

So heres mud in your eye.

(chorus)

Oh, the joy of leap is upon me high

It make me want to Spring, and snuglepie.

(From the 2005 and third omnibus of Pirip’s poems, entitled ‘The Call of Nature on a Penny Anti Visert’. These particular lines came from the poem ‘Halo To All Things But A Special Hiya To You Up There On Hi’. Ed)

Anyway, theres me standing there in the doorway of my own tree house delivring my latest composition to the world on the receiving end. Suddernly I find myselve pulled inside my tree house by the collar by my belovered wife Biddy. Well root me for a ring in, shes got a lot of strength for a crippul what hast to have a block’n’tackle to even get up to the tree house to fool arouwnd, let alone any house orf ground level slike a step or two.

Nsoon there shes falling aslurp still strapped in her leg irerns. Satiated by the excesss of my lurvemaking, I spose. Snoring contenedly like a goodie wifes birthdays come all at once. No doubt dreeming drams and sighting sighs. Floating orf on the lollingpop ship of dreems that nose no shorelines and harbours no horrible realities of crippledom, nsuch. Lucky her. Me just laying there for soon I must go. Parting tis such sweet sorbet nsuchlike. Tormented by my poetry that wont out of its grip let me go. For sample, just tossered orf these lines here:

Why hast it chosen me ?

Because I act up in a lovely tree?

Oh, yeses and noes

Thats how it goeses

For the higher up the berry tree

The harder tis to bury yr poetrie

(From Pirip’s ‘Dont Call The Tree a Sap, But Wringa Wringa Rosin’, or, as better known in sporting sheets throughout the Portuguese-speaking world, ‘The Sap Hast the Resin Rosin’. Ed)

Anyway theres me laying there, suddernly Hermann my faithful pet rat who is only called Hermann to distingish him from all the other rats around our Tip, lurkly appears and between my toes is lickling madly. Obvously knowing how sad I probly am deep in my inner core, wherever that is, and running his loverly red eyes up a long Biddys loin cloth smuch as to say, going:

‘Say, whos this you have got here in a lerve tryst high above the rubbish line so high, whoowhoo? Is this the same whiff or tis it on the highest, ha ha?’

Anyway, theres Hermann telling me tis bout time you returned to the waiting world, as the cook sed to the new girl. In a little while Hermann, I say unto him while in the mixtime I stand in the doorway and look out pnnst my Tip domaine once more.

Tis a sitesight that to tire me never will. Watching the evening begin to fey to dust in the coming nights sky what heralds the moon nsuchlikes etc. Birds flying home with the daily bred out of someones mouth. Content arfter a hard days work at the offise, I spose. The odd insect hopping about Hermann and I or me, trying to talk to us in insects lingo. Sorry, insects, but we have still a ways to go up the evolving tree before we can endolge in little chats and chinwags but for now stop frikking bugging us, yeah?. The croakking of froks in all my slops lakes and rivers running thru tossled household goods below us singing their montonous tunes to their hats contents. All this alone tis enough to make the sap of my own poetry begin to rise and spunk away a gain…

As of the evening, dies the suns raiders

Up drum the cheeky little cicaders,

Reminding us that we are not alones,

Oh, if only I had a million slingshot stones!

(Students of the strict pentameter may find their recreational kick in Philip P. Pirip’s poem in which the memorable above lines appear. They are referred to in his ‘In Praise of Natures Green Gone Motley’ series; the specific poem is ‘Tonight the Cicaders Be On the Boil and the Pus Tis On the Simper’, page 298 of the first edition of ‘The Insecter Inspecter General; A Nose-pokering into a Hard Case Called Shell’. Ed)

Hard to stop it as the bishop said to the nun unzipping as farst as he can. And yeah, theres me and my pet rat Hermann looking over my own Tip domain what I hope is stil what I think it is. Eden that it tis, and all that nsuchlike. Supplusing everything that any one man could want for for himselve and his lovered ones. Gods Goad Earth in the bewdy of the sunset. My arm around Hermann and his ratty claws digging into my shoulders affecshunately, pukkit Hermann. Dramming there on the dreem I always have about when I am dead fukking rich and famrous from my poetry and own my own rubbersh Tip where all manner of man can come with their famerlies and spend happy hours scurrying around like Hermann and co as they deporsit their rubbish without the pressers of suberbia making them kip up with the Joanses and Jone, whoever they are. Personally Ive never heard of them.

But now nights acoming on with the speed of days dawning. The whirl of the hevens what make the hands of Old Farter Time go round, I spose. Suddernly tired n happy I am. I look back parse Hermanns front eye teeth in my ear at chomp and see how littul wife Biddys snoring away slike a basterd, even as shes sinking slowly back to earth, while I am guessing her leg irons are too heavy for the tree-houses bamboo floor and hast fallen through again. Geez, Biddy, see you back down in the Tippiphome, yeah?

For some reeson theres Hermanns calling me a dirty rat. He oughts talk, ha ha. But before I canst dig him in the rat ribs and going as it just pops out like with the bishop with the nun when he finly got it unzippered:

A tumble in the hay

Is this the larst straw of the dying day?

If tis jerst say say dont blame me for

Who knew she twas fallin’ thru the floor?

(These lines remained incognito for some time but kept knocking until the world of poetry cracked and fell in on them. Later found under the rubble, they were taken as rubble and never saw their own like again. Ed)

Suddernly theres me hving just turned away to pick up Hermann for to jump down arfter my Biddy gorn thru the floor to be upon terror firmer rubbisha, as we say in the poo keeping it to ourselves, when out of the Big Blew Yonder what I call my minds own came a arrow parse me as straight as a die. Well root me, that was farking close nso on. Then looking down into my arms I am. What do you think I see but only that arrow or one like it tis quivring out of my poor Hermanns sleek furry vermins body quivring in its death throws nsuchlike spelling wise.

Hermann! My pet rat amongst millions of ratty candidates! Minest own! Gotten up on the wrong side of some archer! Died, straight as a, by this fukking arrow with its name written all over it, with me not having any part of it, cept adding to the sorry world, how can I not?:

Hermann, Hermann, if thy name be Sherman

Couldst rolled on over the Germans

but now you’re up n gone on the Fritz

n lets toast it with the piss with the spritz!

(Pirip said he once read the Germans overran Europe like rats and after that couldn’t look at his Hermann unless he was tanked. The actual lines are from, ‘Hail the Heinz Stomp Chomp Stomp’. Ed)

Still, puckit, now I must grief for my suddernly dead ratty pet by looking around for another whats alive and kicking with a closeness to fit. Oddly enough, my prayers are answered then and there. For attached to that vishus arrow there tis a note. I the envelop open and the stamps pocket just in case. What does this mystrious note say? It says in no meen terms:

‘I have a friend with old English fruit rat. You can it buy for only five hundred dollars, bargain of the year, as long as you don’t go the quibbles. Here’s the address. Signed, A. N. Other’.

Well root me for a beet, in the midst of grief a friend in deed. For arfter the events of the last few weeks when Fate hast me hving to lend assistense to some dirty old man who wast beaten up in my own backyards Tipinterior, it lurks slike a watchdog I certinly need pronto the donto even if it tis an Olde English fruit rat at big bucks goin’. What a big gnaw-thru. So hang the xpernse, tomorrow Hermann the Secund will I buy o boy.

Jest about the same time as, theres me dropping poor Hermann the exFirst down through the hole in the floor left by Biddy and into dead-eye-dick into her lap below for to hold him in the meanwhile nsuch. Twill keep her comperny for as long as it remains warm while I too am leaving the tree house to return to our famerly Tiphome in time hopely for waiting chow time, providing Biddy stops fucking around with that dead rat n her hands washes.

(I can even boast, if that is the word implying boost, of being there at the start. One could call it coincidence, but at the time, being on the short and rough end of my first and hopefully last mugging, as your editor here, I allowed it no coincidence value, only rotten timing.

I didn’t know his name was Phillip P. Pirip then. Having seen him only that once, I had no reason whatsoever for thinking that I might ever get to know him so well. Yet, and here’s the rub!, it was to me that he sent his Papers and it took only one glance to make me sit up straight in my chair, or most certainly would have if I could remember where I was at the time.

Suddenly, in my very hands, I had a firsthand account, among other vital things, of what had actually happened on that day and beyond when those two thugs had proceeded to make too good a fist of thugging me out, delivered with an almost admirable grunting rhythm of kick-starts to my poor unprotected konk, and emitting what I freely acknowledge still as my own whimper-moans. I was praying to God to let me survive and I would never return to dump my ivy cuttings in the Tip again. [Being only human, I couldn’t keep to that promise and am eternally promising to do better.]

So might have you. I mean, you are merely minding your own business on an off-day midday weekday day casting a boot load of ivy cuttings onto the stenchful, but always fulsomely so, piles at what you have always thought as the local Council rubbish tip. You wouldn’t be thinking as I was, shall 0I indulge in a little rummage? Should I get into a real wallow longa here, throw a few rotten tomatoes at the bigger-than-cats rats for that one thing that I’ve always wanted in the whole of my life and which, unearthed, would surely make itself known to me?

When, suddenly, you hear a scream.

It was one of those real screams that are often elongatingly spelt scrreeeeam, and aptly, too. It came from a part of the tip somewhere over the way, but I froze when I heard it; listened, but heard nothing more. So, I shrugged and got back to my ivy cuttings and rotten tomatoes, suddenly anxious to unload and get clear of the place. Then it came again. Or, rather, another scream came again. This one was shorter, somehow more horrifyingly final in the way it cut off abruptly in, as it were, mid-scream’s stream.

Still, I could see nothing. I was about to get myself moving to peep, at least, over the nearest mountain of off-loadings, when I saw what was to prove to be Philip P. Pirip for the first time.

He was on the high ground above me that led from the shed at the entrance of the tip to the high wall at the northern area of the tip’s territory, and he was running towards what I supposed to be the scream situation. I must say here, knowing that he will be the least offended, that my impression of the propulsion his little nuggetty frame (154 centimetres – see the popular ‘1001 Great Australian Lives Condensed into a Few Feet’, Rigby Limited, Adelaide, 2008 at its termination party) was one of pumping and blowing and puffing so as to propel him up and down rather than forward. However, he did manage to pass out of sight.

Then came, behind him, Biddy, his wife, as I now know her name to be. A pretty little thing, even allowing for her atrocious physical disabilities and moving with a kind of traction that reminded me of a train that is laying its own iron rails as it pushes forward on its own leg irons as wheels. I now know too that her loving little eyes must have been crying out to him to be careful, if not mind his own business and leave whatever it was well alone. And though she proved to be quite emotion-mute, I still think I can hear her huffing and puffing in his wake. Biddy boiling, as if.

I had the distinct impression, too, that just as they were about to pass out of my sight, she had all but caught up with him and was about to launch herself into a rugby tackle upon him. This, I admit now, would have been extremely difficult for her given those leg irons – and yet I could have sworn just then that she was trying her darnedness to get him asunder of her.

Behind her, in a mind-fuddling regimental line, followed the Pirips’ household pets -- Hermann, the cockroaches Thunder and Lightning. (Sheba, the pet dog/rat, as explained in the Papers, had not been acquired at that stage.) Not that, then, I knew them to be pets, nibbling at her heels as they were. In fact, the three of them following Biddy presented me with an unusual optical illusion, for all I imagined I was seeing were three large and bowed ribbons flapping along on ratty-type bodies after her. Two blue and one pink. Yet there was still the deadliness of the scream-and-a-half hanging in the fumey air, and this heckity-peckity charivari was heading straight into the fray the scream-and-a-half promised, at least to me.

Yet it all seemed unreal. After all, the tip is too much a place of mental soothing, and the day was so huely pellucid that even the malefactions of the mountains of household detritus seemed sweetish to my ears, notwithstanding what my eyes and nose were telling me. Surely, it could only be something like some child or other had fallen in a hole of slop and was about to be rescued by the tip man and his family. So, I shrugged and go back to giving my ivy cutting the right royal heave-ho.

… But before I get return our attentions to the scream-and-a-half and the disagreeability of being thrashed by two of the worst thugs imaginable, especially around the arm pits, perhaps I should set the straught scene of the Pip Papers’ starting point by describing my surroundings there.

I think it right to do so, because the setting of the tip is such a cornerstone of all that followed that to present you with this remarkable dossier without colouring it in would be akin to publishing a volume of the world’s great battles without explaining terrains, a task I once dwelt on before discarding it, remembering the most basic of literary mantras outside of Australian circles: locus and then if you can’t focus, give it to the locusts.

And so… the vast rubbish tip at Roebottom had the extra purpose of reclaiming extra land for the new housing required for the new growth area on the outskirts of the city. As the bowdlerized version of the Papers was edited to express, ‘Rubbish built on rubbish, and both likely to shift, if all the rutting couples in the new houses don’t break step while they’re at it’.

Why such a neatly cleaving valley that gullies down in such a fine land-sweep to the coast needs reclaiming by flattening out all the gullies care of kitchen bins is a puzzle to me, but I am only a passing figure in all this, after all.

The tip is a series of levels, each separated by the conglutinated hillocks of rubbish at the head of each level. High at the entrance when I was there, and undoubtedly still is, was the tip man’s residence. At first sight one might be forgiven to think it an old pioneer’s shed that someone wanted no longer, mostly made out of packing cases. Councilesque, would be a fitting adjective for it perhaps, yet the pretty little arrangements of the better and drier produce and products from the dumps that embellished the Tiphome clearly showed it to be a Home capital H in bud, a love-and-care ground of Philip P. Pirip and his Biddy and all who scratched away at them.

Far across on the other side, at a lower level, and actually beyond the tip’s boundary, are two other important landmarks to our story, of which I was an unwitting and unknowing early participant by way of the Big Bash. The first, standing on the now-disused Battery Road, was Magwitch’s Smithy (‘Wrot Iron and Wrotten Metal Workings’). This was, and still is, a large corrugated tin shed, but so badly rusted that, from up on the vantage of the higher entrance of the tip, it appeared quite brilliantly painted red.

The second, set in its own large estate that had been so neglected that you could only see the upper storey and roof of the once-mansion even from the tip’s entrance, was the enclosed residence of the enigmatic and legendary Miss Van Eyck or, more commonly, Haversham.

I, like so many others and a good deal more than most, only knew her then as Miss Haversham, or more commonly Miss Havisham, her stage name, or even more commonly by contortive spellings of her name, as like Miss Hagsashame. Twenty years or so ago, her name was on everyone’s lips. Certainly, her sudden withdrawal into a fortress-like seclusion at the height of that fame had become as legendary as that of the ‘I want to be alone’ other lady of beyond-the-pale. Even so, who would have guessed before this remarkable dossier came to light what was going on behind those high walls and that gothic façade, almost all covered in cobwebs?

Elsewhere around the tip’s boundary, new housing estates were spouting. The city encroaching. Psychogeographists might even hint that it was this sudden on-rushing of people, this civic encroachment, which brought to a head the amazing events that were to follow.

And so, there I was… if I may paraphrase Philip P. Pirip’s most persistent coinages… innocently dispatching my bootful of ivy cuttings on one of the tip’s muck levels, when the first scream came and this tome can properly be said to have started. All I could see, as I said, was the menage Pirip seemingly charivari-ing its way along the high ground towards that scream situation.

When heard a ‘Hey!’, I conjectured that this must have been Pirip shouting out to the attackers of the old man who turned out to be the agency of the screams, even though he, Pirip, recently told me he couldn’t remember doing that. Then there was a sort of quietus from where I stood. I was just about to jump back into the safety of my car for God knows what reason, although I do remember, foolishly, being very annoyed at the Council and determined to write a nasty letter, when the muggers appeared.

They were obviously departing from the scene in something of a hurry and yet they were not in that much of a hurry, unfortunately. In fact, they were more cloying with unflurried confidence on the hoof, rather than ‘doing a bunk’, over the rubbish hummock to my right. I somehow sensed they were even smiling behind those masks. Both were moving with pronounced limps without seeming to be impeded by them perhaps by the syncopation of their movements. I remember having the absurd thought that that was because the natural slope of the pile was on their long-legged sides, but since one was a limp-lefty and the other a limp-rightie, this was absurd since they were coming the same way. Which was towards me, I regret to say.

Classicists would have noticed that, together, the two masks were aspects of Janus, the Roman deity. The smiling and the frowning, the war and the peace, the pax and the bellum... yes, the classical opposites. Most of us, though, would recognise them as the tragic and comic masks that symbolize our theatre. Reading the Pip Papers, as our document has latterly been called, I can now see why, but it was a no little shock to me then to have such masks on two real people in a very real situation thundering down on a very really real me. The court jester outfits they were wearing didn’t minimize my feelings of disjointed reality, either.

Though I was not to know it then, I had in fact seen these two ruffians around the neighbourhood before. The first, who I might as well identify here and now as Compeyson, I had seen coming and going out of the Haversham residence on the odd occasion I had driven by the place. The other, who also might as well be identified now, was Orlick, a known helper in the Magwitch blacksmith shop and as nasty a piece of work as one would wish to meet in a dark alley. The sheer sarcastic brutality of both of them I was instantly about to experience at first hand.

If I had threatened them with civil arrest, I might have understood why they set about me. All I did, for some silly reason, was start chasing them. There’s a bit of a blank in my memory there, until somehow, they were chasing me back towards my car. They caught up with me in the open and there’s not much more I can explicitly relate, except for the usual metaphors that are given for such occasions -- hairy fists everywhere raining down, sudden blackout like night descending, visual snatches of boots stomping down and into and of knees flying as though a light in my head was being flicked on and off; the distinct feeling that two people were running on the spot somewhere on top of me stomp-stomp-stomp-limp, stomp-stomp-stomp-limp; the smell of rubber like car tyres in my nostrils (this was no metaphor, in fact; it was of those on my rather new car (I had somehow crawled right up to it, or had been thrown against it); and a gravelly voice booming like the wrath of God:

‘None of your damn business, ickshay?'

I must have blacked out for a moment. When I was seeing reasonably clearly again, they were mercifully nowhere to be seen. I can tell you now, whether it’s to my discredit or something anyone could understand, I immediately got into my car and left that tip as fast as I could. At the time, I defended myself against taking the matter to the police by telling myself that they had taken my wallet and, since their one sentence was definitely a threat and not a statement, they now knew where to find me.

It is of some small comfort to me now to learn from my duties of guiding this important dossier into almost-legible print that nothing would have been accomplished even if I had taken the matter further. The forces of law were already closing in, and on a much higher level than my local constabulary or my ivy cuttings could ever have achieved. The only difference it might have made would have been to allow me to get up the nerve to return to the tip. I never did, at least not for many years, not until my ivy cuttings had become overwhelming at home… and by then the place was famous for the international rise to fame of its son and our hero, Phillip P. Pirip.

And the screams? Even if I had stayed around to discover their sources, I would not have recognised that they had been wrought out of poor old Magwitch, the blacksmith.

Apparently, what happened, as later investigations detailed, was this: Compeyson and Orlick caught up with the old chap in those finicolous dunes. I can imagine the chase and the tang piles complementing the chuddering hobble and the mounting limps hot on the old man’s back of the neck. The first scream came when they caught him by the piles (but whether that was referring to his or the tip’s cannot be ascertained). Philip P. Pirip, having observed the chase from his tip house at the higher level, started the familial procession down to see what the heck was going on in his tip, which parade of him, Biddy and the pet vermin I was the first-hand witness to.

The old man released his second, choked-off scream after, through the agency of a butcher’s knife from one of their bluchers, either Compeyson or Orlick or both (it matters not) began a vas deferens cut right up to the upper right scrotal region of poor old Magwitch’s fallen body. That is to say, he started the second scream when he saw what they were about to do to him, but then, when he actually experienced the reality, sucked in his breath with such cataclysmic counteraction to his scream that his ageing lungs collapsed. That would account for the scream short-circuited in midstream and my own sensation of testicle inversion at the time -- and I was just hearing it from a distance.

By now, the Pirip entourage was approaching reasonably fast, or approaching fast enough anyway. The murderous two took off, passing by me very, very unfortunately with only half their villainy vented. You know what happened then, when my innocent ivy cuttings went sent flying.

For three whole days and a bit, apparently, old Magwitch lay in that spot, with Philip P. Pirip making him as comfortable as possible and even, as we now know from his Papers, stealing the scraps off his own table to wedge them beneath the newspapers on which Magwitch had fallen or had been pushed, so that the rivalling tip vermin could show the old fellow the way out. On the fourth night, Philip P. Pirip made his usual Samaritan visit to find the old man gone.

He was puzzled about this, of course. What he could not have known then, as all of us who followed the recent trial know now, was that, during that fourth day, three white-coated attendants arrived on the spot and removed Magwitch to a mental home on the other side of the city. They would not have needed to use much force and there was certainly, according to the meteorological records, cloud cover over the usual tip smoke haze, which would have lowered any witness’s visibility. They locked the poor old smithy away for what proved to be many years in an iron lung in a cell with soundproof walls.

A sorry affair.

Philip P. Pirip has told me that he quite forgot about the incident at the time, presuming the old man to have made a recovery and gone off to his own forge to forge himself back into shape. The old boy was certainly, he recalls, fuming about something at the times he visited him. But then it seems the old boy was pretty much always known as a bit of a griper around the neighbourhood.

It was a number of years before our national poet hero learnt what had really been the cause and the reason behind the old man’s sudden disappearance like that. That knowledge, as those of you who cannot put this book down will find out...

Ed)

chapter 2

Command the wind and tell it not to blow,

Forbid the rain to fall and the sun that shined

Speak to the yeller rose that it mustnt grow

But dont tell me, alone Ive blown my mined.

(chorus)

O you are ever so young and fair

Your dark hair falling down gawd knows wear

The moonbeams danced upon yr cheek

If you hadnt hit the ground it might have been the creek.

Oh, parting this way is such sweat sorrow

Ill bring you a splint if youre still there tomorrow

(From Philip P. Pirip’s ‘Rash Collection: ‘Whos he When Hives At 'Ome?’. It burst on record players all over the world; even Times Square ran ads about how very, very long playing it was, even after the power was switched off. Still, it is generally considered an invaluable addition to his third volume of verse, ‘The Unknoem Powns’. Ed]

Nthen etc believe it or not, theres about then the dirty grrrt screem out loud and ow what a screem!

But first, about my lerve nest the Tiphome, I know you are ankshus to know. Modessty says twas only a 1 room wodern shack. As far as I was concerned modessty was wrong for upstairs bedrooms galore and bathrooms did it have, with lounges etc downstairs and a kitchen with things they call all cons, whatever they are, chockablock with the most fablous treasures spilling out of the somethingorother horn of plenty of the Tip. Fridges and washing machines by the gross, coloured bikes parts and tyres and furnitures the hews of the rainbow scattered everywhere on the floor and around the garden. Grass cuttings

(not forgetting the ivy cutting, I might modestly add. Ed)

providing lawns for grassy vistas as far as yr sprinkled eye on the spatula can see, nsuch. Talk about all cons. All cons tisnt in it. Not bad for just a one-room woodern shack, even if say so myselve as I do. If you ain’t got any imagination youll behind the 8 ball before we be orf n running, yeah?

While thru all this, as I sed suddernly theres thatthere screem in the very air around is hanging. Stuff me.

And befour Im knowing it, theres Biddy on the damp soggy earth at my muddy feet with tears slowly spurting forth from her littul yellow eyes going to pieces, as the cod said before it got the chop.

I cry out to her for to get orf the cleen part of my shoes so we both be in suddern panic nsuch, falling down with sodden newborn tears going parse my own pupils and falling down like a sprinkler hoping for grass at my elbows side. Well root me in the pot I simper in, how did I get down here, pukkit, again. Must be my poetrical sensitive soul wanting to become as low as Biddys feeling I spose and tis about as low as you can get on that gravel path there. Yes,

‘Biddy babe, whas the fug?’

I am screeming out to her croakking. Probly with a frog in my throat making all the noise, ha ha. You can imagine. You try it on a gravel path. Running up to her on the full of my bended knees, willing her to look unto my own eyes strait and stop fukking around. Biddy parsing a message between us from eyeball to eyeball which is pleading with me to understand her eyeball talk. Understand what?, until finally I get it. Shes like saying:

‘Listen to the screem just up’n’done!’

and then it I get, eyeball very much needed. You know, tis amazing how so much can change in ones idyllic life when ones knokked for a sax while ones dearly beloved cant keep her eyeball shut cos shes gorn n lorst it.

But that wasnt all; things of greater import were, whatever they are, that were upsetting her truely. Oh no, Biddy. Oh yes, Pip, she cries out at me thru the shocking sight of her deeply shocked eyes shiverling with fright or some fikking thing. Going on to tell me shes only lorst her way on account of the screem that screemed and making her unable to find our belovered Tippiphome anymore. Phew. Thats easily up cleared. Happily I inform her dumbbell shes leaning against it, the marital love nest not the screem. But shes informing me arfter mucho relief all rownd and cuddles of gratritude that the screem has made her gone and lorse her leg irons so she cant walk home without mud wallowing. Shittit, those leg irerns kept her on the straight n narrer, too! Ha ha. Puckit, this tis getting serius alright, Biddy. No wonder her poor littul right leg was there bending backwards over her left leg and both of them cawte behind her neck. This is no pucking place to put your feet up, Biddy, I go, like the maid caught with her knikkers coming down hanging by the yardarm.

Tears of joy springing into her petite n littul peepers when she lerns from my eyes getting animated with shit-it-all that theres her spare purking set of leg irons propping her up against the wall otherwise dont you think droopy drawers you wouldve toppled over from the waste down alreddy, ikshay? Good, thats settled then. But then doesnt she ever inform me that the screem alsos gone and made her lorse our two childrun as well. Not the ones you cant replace?, I go! Her eyes bursting into a nerther torment that would make any mothers eyes weep motherfukkeredly nsuchlike etc.

Dead calm from clenching fist I inform her that now she mentions our two belovered offsprigs, her third set of leg irerns I remember seeing. They twere back down there on the banks of the deeperst slops lake of the Tip where tides run strongly and where een the worlds best swimmer would lorse his slosh fsure. Id noticed them there because one was sticking through the beany hat of my little boy lorst whose name I just temprarily forget. And the other leg iron was sticking through the bonnet of my own littul girl lorst whose name also is slipping by my tongue at the liptips at the moment. Remembering seeing them because they were laying on the bank by 2 sets of air bubbules fading away farst twards the deeper water there. And theres me thinking that twas probly only a parsing crocs as the deadhead said coming out of the other end of the alligator or crabs out for a Sundee stroll nsuch. Stuffing hell, Biddy u nut job, I twouldnve dreemt that those air bubbules were my two own littul darling lorst sprogs drowning there without even waving ta-tas, would you? Oh, my children! My own flash then bred! Drowned and gorn to a Better Place somewhere in the great heven for the better behaved nsuchshay!

Oh me o my, you shouldve seen how Biddy and I didst roll and writhe on the lawn cuttings

(and the ivy ones. Ed)

there a fishing line of our own front Tipdoor within. Gnashing our kroners on edge being put and pulling out her hairs, mine being protected by arts grants to come, phew. I cant bear to