Snuff Fiction Read online

  ‘I’m very pleased to hear that.’

  ‘What I’m doing here’, said the uncle, ‘is for all mankind. Not just a favoured few. What I am doing here will bring about world peace. You asked why I chose to cultivate these particular varieties of plant, didn’t you?’

  I nodded that I did.

  ‘It is because of the drugs that can be distilled from them. Powerful hallucinogens, which, when blended correctly and taken in careful doses, allow me to enter an altered state of consciousness. Whilst in this state it is possible for me to communicate directly with the vegetable kingdom. As Dr Doolittle talked to the animals, so I can talk to the trees.’

  I glanced across at the Doveston, who made a pained expression. ‘What do the trees have to say?’ I asked.

  ‘Too much,’ said the uncle, ‘too much. They witter like dowagers. Moaning about the squirrels and the sparrows, the traffic and the noise. If I hear that old oak by the Seamen’s Mission go on one more time about how civilized the world used to be, I’m sure I’ll lose my mind.’

  I ignored the Doveston’s rolling eyes. ‘Do all trees talk?’ I asked.

  ‘As far as I know,’ said the uncle. ‘Although of course I can only understand the English ones. I’ve no idea what the Dutch elms and Spanish firs are saying.’

  ‘Perhaps you could take a language course.’

  ‘I’ve no time for that, I’m afraid.’

  I nodded moistly and plucked once more at my groin. ‘So the secret police want to talk to trees too, do they?’ I asked.

  ‘Their masters do. You can imagine the potential for espionage.’

  I couldn’t really, so I said as much.

  The uncle waved his hands about. ‘For spying. You wouldn’t need to risk human spies, if plants could do it for you. Just think what the potted plants in the Russian embassy have overheard. They’d be prepared to tell you, if you asked them nicely.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, and I did. ‘But you’d have to learn how to speak Russian.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but you get the point?’

  ‘I do get the point,’ I said. ‘So that is the Great Work.’

  ‘It’s a part of it.’

  ‘You mean there’s more?’

  ‘Much more.’ The uncle preened at his lapels. ‘Communicating with plants was only the first part. You see I wanted to know just what it was that plants wanted out of life and so I asked them. The ones in this conservatory grow so well because they tell me what they want and I give it to them. How much heat, how much light and so on. But there’s one thing that all plants really want, and do you know what that is?’

  ‘Love?’ I said.

  ‘Love?’ said the Doveston.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Not love then?’

  ‘They want to get about,’ said the uncle. ‘Move about like people do. They get really fed up spending all their lives stuck in one place in the ground. They want to uproot and get on the move.’

  ‘And that’s why you’ve bred the chimeras.’

  ‘Exactly. They are the first of a new species. The plant/animal hybrid. My beautiful boys are a different order of being.’

  ‘They’re rather fierce,’ said I.

  ‘Well, you need to be fierce when you go into battle.’

  ‘Cubs,’ said the Doveston. ‘Time for the Cubs.’

  No,’ I said. ‘What battle, sir?’

  ‘The final conflict,’ said the uncle, rising on his toes. ‘The battle of good against evil, as foretold in the Book of Revelation. This will come in the year two thousand and I shall be ready for it.’

  ‘Are you digging a fallout shelter then?’

  ‘No fallout shelter for me, lad. I shall be leading the charge. I intend to seed the entire globe with my chimeras. They will grow in any climate. They will grow big and fierce and when the call to arms comes, I shall give the signal and they will rise up in their millions, their hundreds of millions, and slay the oppressors. They will march across the lands, a mighty mutant army, destroying all before them, answering to only me. Only me, do you hear, only me!’

  That was the last time I saw the uncle. I didn’t go calling on him again. About a month after that some other folk came knocking at his door. Policemen they were, accompanied by others in white coats. There had been some complaints about missing cats and dogs and apparently a number of blood-stained collars were found in a bag beneath his sink.

  My friend Billy, who was leading a party of American tourists around the Butts, said that he saw the uncle being hauled away, dressed in a long-sleeved jacket that buckled down the back. There was foam coming out of his mouth and the tourists stopped to take pictures.

  On the following day a fire broke out. The house itself was hardly touched, but the beautiful conservatory burned to the ground.

  Nobody knew how the fire had started. Nobody seemed to care.

  Nobody but for the Doveston. And he was clearly upset. He had been very fond of his ‘adopted’ uncle and was greatly miffed at his hauling away. I did what I could to console him, of course, such as buying him sweeties and sharing my fags. I think that we must have grown rather close, because he began to call me Edwin and I began to understand that he had ‘adopted’ me also.

  One lunchtime during the following school term he took me aside in the playground. ‘I believe that I have it in me to make my name famous,’ he said. ‘And I wish you to become my amanuensis and biographer. You will be a Boswell to my Johnson, a Watson to my Sherlock Holmes. It will be your job to chronicle my words and deeds for posterity. What say you to this offer?’

  I pondered upon the Doveston’s words. ‘Will there be money and long-legged women?’

  ‘Plenty of both,’ he replied.

  ‘Then count me in,’ I said and we shook hands.

  And there have indeed been plenty of both. Plenty of both and then some. But before we close the page upon Uncle Jon Peru Joans, one thing remains to be mentioned.

  And that is the matter of his ‘beautiful boys’.

  With the destruction of his conservatory, it was my conviction that I had seen the last of those fierce fellows and so it came as a horrid surprise when four decades later I saw them again. No longer small and enclosed by glass, but wandering large on a country estate.

  Called Castle Doveston.

  4

  Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all their panaceas, potable gold and philosophers’ stones, a sovereign remedy for all diseases.

  Richard Burton (1577—1640)

  We were rarely afraid of anything much, although there was plenty to fear. These were, after all, the 1950s and we were living in the shadow of the Bomb.

  Our parents worried a lot about the Bomb, but we had been given our pamphlets at school and knew that as long as you shielded your eyes from the big flash with a sweet wrapper and remembered to ‘duck and cover’, you’d come out of the holocaust unscathed. What fears we had, we saved for more tangible dangers. There were things you had to know in order to survive childhood and we were pretty sure we knew them all.

  Snakes you had to be careful of. Snakes and the beetles that bite.

  Of snakes there was much common lore, which was passed mouth to ear in the playground. All snakes were deadly and all snakes must die, it was get them before they got you.

  GunnersburyPark was the best place for snakes, or the worst place, perhaps I should say. It was well understood that the park fairly heaved with the blighters. They dangled from the trees, great anacondas and pythons, lurking camouflaged amongst the leaves, eager to take the heads off foolish children who dawdled beneath. The ornamental pond and boating lake were homes to water vipers, slim as hair and fast as Stirling Moss.

  It was well known that if you took a piddle in the boating lake, they would swim up the stream of pee and enter your knob. Once inside they blocked the passage and you filled up with pee and died. The only cure was a terrible one: they had to cut off your willy.

  Snakes loved to get insid
e you by whatever means they could. A boy from Hanwell, it was said, had taken a nap in the park and slept with his mouth open. An adder had slipped down his throat and taken up residence in his stomach. The boy, unaware of this, had eventually woken up and gone home. He was soon taken poorly, however. No matter how much food he now ate he remained all sickly and thin and complained of great churnings in the gut. His worried mother took him to the doctor, who placed his hand upon the boy’s stomach and realized the awful truth.

  This boy was lucky, for he didn’t die. The doctor starved him for two days, then wedged his mouth open and hung a piece of raw meat above it. The hungry adder smelled the meat and came up for a bite. The doctor was able to drag it out of the boy’s mouth and kill it.

  The snake was now preserved in a jar and many claimed to have seen it.

  My friend Billy (who knew more than was healthy for one of his age) said that the story was palpable nonsense. In his opinion the boy would have choked to death had the adder been lured out of his throat.

  Billy said that it came out of his bum.

  But the threat was real enough and no one napped in Gunnersbury Park.

  I do have to say that although I spent a great deal of my childhood in that park, I never actually saw a snake myself.

  Which was very lucky for me.

  The other great danger was beetles that bite. Earwigs were the most common, for, as everybody knows, these crawl into your ear at night and lay their eggs in your brain. Our local loony bin, St Bernard’s, was well stocked with incurable victims of the earwig. Their horrible howls could be heard in the night, as these cranial parasites drove them to distraction with their gnawings and scurryings.

  Stag beetles were deadly and could take your finger off.

  Red ants could strip a grown man down to the bone in less time than it would take his wife to brew a pot of tea. Various spiders lived beneath the toilet seat, ever anxious to scuttle up your bottom and more than three bee stings would kill you for sure.

  What with the snakes and the beetles that bit, it was a miracle that any of us lived to see our teens. But most of us somehow did and this was probably down to either good fortune in avoiding the snakes and the beetles, or to our good health, which was down to our diet.

  We were smitten by disease and by personal vermin that gnawed like the very devil himself, but although the occasional epidemic wiped out a class or two here and there, our year survived all but unscathed.

  And this was down to our diet.

  It was not down to the diet our parents provided, the cabbage and sprouts and the rest. It was down to the extras we fed to ourselves. It was all down to the sweeties.

  Now, it is no coincidence that we lose our taste for sweeties upon reaching puberty. This is the time when we lose that ten per cent of our sense of colour and sound and smell without our even noticing. This is the time of the stirring loins, when sweeties lose their attraction.

  You see, our bodies always know what they need and childhood bodies need sweeties. It is a ‘bodily instinct’, quite removed from the brain. If our childhood bodies need extra sugar, they send a message to our childhood brains. ‘Give me sweets,’ is this message. It is a message that must be heeded. Upon reaching puberty, needs change. Extra starches and proteins are required. ‘Give me beer,’ calls the body to the brain. But, you will observe, it rarely calls this message to a six-year-old.

  Our bodies know what they want and what they need. And woe unto those who deny this. Sweeties kept us healthy. We are living proof of this.

  Although we didn’t actually know that we needed sweeties, we knew that we wanted them and curiously much common lore existed regarding the curative properties of certain brands of confectionery.*

  A popular nursery rhyme of the day may serve to illustrate this.

  Billy’s got a blister.

  Sally’s got a sore.

  Wally’s got a willy wound

  That weeps upon the floor.

  Molly’s got the minge rot.

  Ginny’s got the gout.

  Take ‘em to the sweet shop.

  That’ll sort ‘em out.

  And how true those words are, even today.

  As children, we instinctively knew that the sweetie shop held more in the way of medicine than any branch of Boots. And any qualified chemist who knows anything about the history of his (or her) trade will tell you that most sweeties began life as cures for one complaint or another.

  Liquorice was originally a laxative. Peppermint was good for the sinuses. Aniseed helped dispel internal gas. Hum (one of the principal ingredients in humbugs) staved off dropsy, and chocolate, lightly heated and then smeared over the naked body of a consenting adult, perks up a dull Sunday afternoon no end.

  And how true those words are, even today.

  Our local sweetie shop was run by old Mr Hartnell. His son Norman (not to be confused with the other Norman Hartnell) was in our class and a popular boy was he. Norman was a born confectioner. At the age of five his father had given him a little brown shopkeeper’s coat of his own and, when not in school uniform, Norman was rarely to be seen wearing anything other than this.

  Norman lived and breathed (and ate) sweeties. He was to sweeties what the Doveston would later be to tobacco, although he would never achieve the same fame. He would, in later life, receive acclaim for his scientific endeavours, which have been written of in several books and indeed will be written of here.

  The Doveston and I befriended Norman. Not that he lacked for friends, you understand. He attracted friendship in the way that doggy doo does flies. But, in the Doveston’s opinion, these were just friends of the fair-weather persuasion. Good-time Charlies and Johnny-come-latelys, buddying up with the shopkeeper’s son for naught but the hope of free sweeties.

  ‘What that Norman really needs’, declared the Doveston, one July morning, during P.E., ‘is the guiding hand of a mentor.’

  ‘But where might such a hand be found?’ I asked.

  The Doveston showed me one of his own. ‘On the end of my arm,’ said he.

  I examined the item in question. It was grubby as usual and black at the nails, with traces of jam on the thumb. If this was indeed the hand of a mentor, then I possessed two of my own.

  ‘What exactly is a mentor?’ was my next enquiry.

  ‘A wise and trusted adviser or guide.’

  ‘And you think Norman needs one?’

  ‘Just look at him’, the Doveston said, ‘and tell me what you think.’ I glanced along at Norman. We were all lined up in the big hall, mentally, if not physically, preparing ourselves for the horrors of the vaulting horse. Norman had, as ever, been thrust to the head of the line by his ‘friends’.

  He was a stocky, well-set lad, all big knees and podgy palms. And being the son of a confectioner, there was much of the sweetie about him. His skin was as pink as Turkish delight and his cheeks as red as cherry drops. He had lollipop lips and a marzipan chin, butterscotch hair and a mole on his left shoulder that resembled a Pontefract cake.

  Norman stood in his vest and pants, having forgotten to bring his games kit. Mr Vaux, all tweed and cravat, blew his whistle. Norman made the sign of the cross, ambled forward, gathered speed, jumped and plunged headfirst into the horse.

  The mighty leathern four-legged beasty took it with scarcely a shudder. Norman stiffened, did that comedy stagger which in cartoons is always accompanied by small birds circling the head, and then collapsed unconscious on the parquet floor.

  There were no great cries of horror and no runnings forward to help. After all, we’d seen this happen many times and if you ran to help without permission, you got walloped with the slipper.

  Mr Vaux called for injury monitors and we all put up our hands, for it was well known that Norman always kept a few toffees hidden in his underpants.

  Our teacher did a ‘you and you’ and Norman was gathered up and stretchered from the hall.

  ‘What that lad needs is a mentor,’ I said.

&n
bsp; The Doveston nodded. ‘You’re not wrong there.’

  On this particular occasion Norman’s concussion was sufficiently severe to merit a sending home early and so, after school, the Doveston and I went around to his daddy’s shop to offer our best wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery.

  It was Wednesday afternoon and the shop was early-closed. We knocked and waited and while we waited we gazed longingly through the front window.

  This week it was dominated by a display for a new brand of American cigarette: Strontium Nineties. There were large cardboard cut-outs of fresh-faced college boys and girls, flat-topped and pony-tailed, grinning and puffing. Speech bubbles issued from their toothy mouths, with phrases such as ‘Gee whiz, they sure taste good’ and ‘Radiating pleasure, yes siree’ printed upon them.

  ‘What do you think about those?’ I asked.

  The Doveston shook his head. ‘I’ve read a lot about them in the trade press,’ he said. ‘They’re supposedly impregnated with a radioactive element which makes them glow in the dark. The Americans irradiate everything nowadays, it’s supposed to be very good for the health.’

  ‘They irradiate Coca-Cola, don’t they?’

  ‘Allegedly,’ said the Doveston. ‘Allegedly.’

  He knocked again and we waited some more. I knew that the Doveston’s attempts to adopt old Mr Hartnell had met with no success and I must confess that I did not believe that his intention to become Norman’s mentor was altogether altruistic. But the lure of free sweeties and possibly fags was too much for me to ignore.

  The Doveston squinted through the shop-door glass. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he said. Norman’s face appeared before us, somewhat grey and mournful. ‘Piss off,’ it said. ‘Hello, Norman,’ said the Doveston. ‘Is your dad at home?’

  ‘He’s gone to the wholesalers. Same as he does every Wednesday afternoon and he told me not to let any kids in. Same as he does every Wednesday afternoon.

  ‘Very wise too,’ said the Doveston. ‘So, are you coming out, or what?’

  ‘I’m ill,’ said Norman. ‘I’ve got a headache.’