I can\u2019t remember if I ever told you about the Chappies who lived next to us.\u00a0 Chappies were there when I was born in 290 and were there when I left to get married.\u00a0 At least two of the Chappie\u2019s were, that is, Big Chappie and Little Chappie.\u00a0 In my childish days there were three Chappies, the one with the moustache being Chappie Man.\u00a0 He drank out of a very special cup which helped, but not quite, to keep his whiskers out of his tea.\u00a0 He was the only adult male in the whole of our spinster and widow-ridden terrace.\u00a0 Somehow this distinguished association with such a celibate company seems to suit him \u2013 it was hard to conceive even in a child\u2019s imagination his lusting after tender virginhood.\u00a0 He looked like a senior walrus and one could not imagine him in any occupation save grunting and wallowing in the Behring Sea, but was most probably, full of the social graces.<\/p>\n
Chappies were always very kind to me.\u00a0 They were lonely people who did not have many visitors, mad or otherwise.\u00a0 They were used to my screechings and juvenile friendship.\u00a0 By their standards, I suppose my mother was a real go-out. Sometimes they would be baby-sitters for me \u2013 although in those days one just looked after, or minded, a small child.<\/p>\n
It was always a great treat to be looked after by the Chappies.\u00a0 No matter how much food I had consumed at home I could always go their rock cakes and hop beer.\u00a0 After the goodies and whilst they were madly knitting booties and bonnets for sale at Farmer\u2019s, I would be allowed to pound, with all stops out, on their old foot-bellowed organ.\u00a0 Chappies would occasionally drop a stitch but would forgive my ignorance of Bach, or Palestrina, and applaud my Stravinsky sounds even though they had not yet been written.\u00a0 I suppose it was this sort of mod dissonance, and sheer magnitude of noise which started me off on my first abstract nightmares which haunted me when I had finally been rugged up and settled down on their settee. Oh dear!\u00a0 Those crazy interlocking and ever-expanding circles! They engulfed and terrified me in their cosmic inhumanity. A commonplace enough vision of the world now, but real crook in Paddo in 1916.<\/p>\n
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