The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag (3 page)

It was
my first year at infant school, and the teacher had asked us to paint a picture
of what our fathers did for a living. I painted mine and it so impressed the
teacher that she stuck it up in the school hall (a big honour, that). And when
open day came around a week later, she hastened over to my father to engage him
in conversation.

‘Mr
Rankin,’ she said. ‘I wonder if you might consider coming into the school and
giving a talk to the children about your occupation?’

My dad,
a carpenter by trade, asked why.

‘Because,’
said the teacher, ‘you are the first father we’ve ever had at this school who’s
a whaler.’

You
see, several weeks prior to this my dad had given me a whale’s tooth as a
present, and had told me a marvellous tale about having prised it from the jaw
of the slain creature during one of his many whaling voyages. He had never
actually been to sea in his life; he was simply entertaining his young son with
a tall tale well told.

Now any
‘normal’ father, upon being faced with this teacher’s question, might simply
have owned up to the truth and laughed off the whole affair. But not my dad. He
had a duty to his calling. He agreed, without a moment’s hesitation, went home,
fashioned for himself a makeshift harpoon to illustrate throwing techniques,
and returned to school the following week to give his talk.

I was
quite a hero throughout my second term at infant school.

And so
it continued throughout my father’s life. He rose, at length, to the
not-so-giddy heights of general foreman, but wherever he went he spread wonder.
And never more so, nor with greater panache, than when many years later he
finally went to his grave.

His
apotheosis as a tall-story-teller came at his funeral where he was paid a
posthumous tribute to his supreme mastery of the craft. No-one really expects
to leave their father’s funeral with tears of laughter in their eyes. But I
did. My dad had the last laugh, and he let us share it.

A
slightly surreal incident at the start of the proceedings set the tone for what
was to come. One of the pall bearers had a cold and pulled from his pocket an
oversized red gingham handkerchief. Such an item wouldn’t have meant much to
anyone else, but it meant a lot to me.

The
last time I had seen a handkerchief like that was nearly forty years before. My
Aunty Edna, my dad’s sister, always carried one in her handbag. It was scented
with lavender and I loved the smell so much that whenever she came to visit I
would pretend to have a cold so she would let me blow my nose on it. I would
bury my face in that hanky and draw in the marvellous perfume.

The
sight of the pall bearer’s hanky stirred some long-forgotten childhood
memories. But it wasn’t just the handkerchief.

It was
the Polo mint.

As he pulled
out the handkerchief, a Polo mint popped from his pocket. It flew through the
air and fell to the church floor, spiralling slowly forward until it came to
rest beneath my dad’s coffin.

And
there it remained throughout the service.

But the
curious incident of the oversized red gingham handkerchief and the Polo mint
was nothing,
nothing
in the face of what was to come.

‘The
vicar was one of those young, earnest, eager fellows, with the shining face of
a freshly bathed infant. Why do they scrub their faces up like that? Is it the ‘cleanliness
is next to godliness’ angle? I don’t know, but, all aglow and full of beans, he
climbed into the pulpit, gathered his robes about him and began a discourse
upon my dad.

‘I have
only been in this parish for nine months,’ said the vicar, ‘and so I only knew
Mr Rankin during the final stages of his long illness. But it became clear to
me, through my many talks with him, that Mr Rankin was no ordinary man. He had
lived the kind of life that most of us only read about. He had walked alone
across the Kalahari Desert, sailed alone around Cape Horn, conquered some of
the world’s highest peaks, and been decorated twice for deeds of outstanding
valour during the Second World War.’

My
gaze, which had become fixed upon the Polo mint, rose rapidly upon hearing all
this, and a look of horror must certainly have appeared upon my face. My
immediate thoughts were that the vicar was talking about the wrong man. It was
bloody typical, wasn’t it, one old dying man looking just the same as another
to a new vicar with his mind on other things, young housewives of the parish,
probably! I was almost on the point of rising from my pew to take issue with
the erring cleric when I heard the first titters of laughter.

The
church was packed, my dad had a great many friends, and the laughter came in
little muffled outbursts from his old cronies. And as the vicar continued with
tales of my father’s daring escapades, world wanderings and uncanny knack for
always being in the right place at the right time when history was being made,
the laughter spread.

But
never so far as the pulpit.

My
father had spent the last nine months of his life priming up the vicar.

As I
say, I left the church with tears in my eyes.

But the
best was yet to come, and it was almost as if my dad had planned it. In fact,
looking back, I feel certain that he did.

Would
you care to come back to the house for a cup of tea?’ I asked the vicar. ‘Evidently
you were very close to my dad at the end, and I’d like, at the very least, for
us to have a chat.’

The
vicar agreed and we returned to my dad’s place.

And we
hadn’t been there for ten minutes when it came.

The
vicar pointed to the large swordfish saw that hung above the fireplace. ‘Now,
that can tell a tale or two, can’t it?’ he said to me.

I
glanced up at it. As far as I knew the thing had been utterly mute ever since
my dad had purchased it in a Hastings antique market. But then it might have
confided a tale or two to him in private, I couldn’t be certain.

‘Would
you like to refresh my memory?’

‘Indeed,’
said the man of the cloth, sipping tea. ‘Your father told me about the time he
was fishing for sailfish alone off the Florida Keys, and a sudden storm blew
his boat far out to sea. He lost all contact with land and during this storm,
which was, according to your father, nothing less than the infamous Hurricane
Flora of 1966, his oars were blown overboard.

‘Your
father thought that his time had surely come and, being the pious man he was,
he offered himself to God’s tender mercy. There was a flash of lightning and at
that very moment a swordfish burst its saw — that very one hanging there — up
through the bottom of the boat. Using the skills he had learned while working
as a circus strongman, your father snapped off the saw, thrust his foot into
the hole and, using the saw for a paddle, rowed back to land.’

To say
that I was speechless would be to say, well, I
was
speechless.

After
the vicar left, my mum took me quietly to one side. ‘I think it would probably
be for the best if none of this was ever spoken of again, don’t you, dear?’ she
said.

I
nodded thoughtfully. ‘Trust me, Mum,’ I told her. ‘I won’t mention it to
another living soul.’

And I
have, of course, remained true to my promise.

My Uncle Brian, my dad’s
younger brother, was not a carpenter or a general foreman. He was a fox farmer.
I never even knew that fox farms existed before he told me about them.
Apparently, without fox farms the entire British economy would have ground to a
halt a long time before it actually did in the year 2002, with the fall of the
British book publishing industry and pretty much everything else. But during
the 1980s and 1990s, fox farming at secret government establishments kept it
buoyant. You see, there weren’t enough foxes to hunt and so fox farms had to
breed even more.

Allow
me to explain.

As most
folk will know, blood sports have, in recent times, become something of an
issue and one which has deepened the divide between the rural and the urban
communities.

There
has always been a divide, but this is to be expected. Country folk have long
considered themselves to be a cut above the simple townie. Country folk feel
themselves to be closer to nature, more in tune with its natural rhythms and
custodians of the land for generations yet to come. Townies, in their opinion,
are a bunch of glue-sniffing football hooligans, packed like lab rats into
high-rise blocks, stunted both mentally and physically by a diet of McDonald’s
burgers and traffic fumes. Gross, perverted and not nice to know.

Townies,
however, lean to a different opinion. They consider themselves a cut above the
simple bumpkin. Townies feel themselves to be better educated and more
sophisticated, having greater access to the arts and information technology.
They look upon country folk as a bunch of ignorant, inbred sheep-shaggers who
get off on cruelty and blood-letting. Gross, perverted and not nice to know.

Both
sides are, of course, way off the mark, although it could be argued that
sheep-shagging is an almost exclusively rural recreation.

So it
comes as little surprise to find that the countryman and the townie disagree
over the matter of blood sports.

In the
summer of 1997 almost half a million concerned country folk marched peacefully
upon London to heighten the awareness of the public at large regarding the
threat to rural England posed by a proposed Bill to abolish the blood sport of
fox-hunting.

What
the dim-witted townie failed to understand, the country folk patiently
explained, was that without foxhunting there would be no English countryside.
Consider, they said, all those people whose livelihoods depend directly upon
foxhunting. The saddlers, the grooms, the ostlers, the stable lads and lasses.
The riding instructors, the vets, the manufacturers of horse pills and tackle
and donkey nuts and stirrup cups. The blacksmiths and the blacksmiths’
apprentices, the horse-breeders, the makers of horse boxes and those who worked
in the factories that produce those stickers you see in the rear windows of
Range Rovers that say ‘I ♥ greys’.

And
that was only the horses. What about the dogs? What about those packs of
beautiful cuddly foxhounds? They’d all have to be destroyed. Destroyed! Dogs
destroyed! A national shame! And with their destruction would go the
livelihoods of the Masters of Foxhounds, their apprentices and assistants, the
whippers-in, the manufacturers of dog collars and dog biscuits and dog food,
more vets and so on and so forth.

Thousands
upon thousands upon thousands of hard-working honest country folk would be
doomed to lives of dole-queue misery only previously reserved for
town-dwellers.

Catastrophe!

And
worse, far worse, what about the land itself? England depended upon its
farmland. Its farmland and its produce. The land! Dear Lord, the land!

To put
it plainly, there would be no more land. Without the efforts of the gallant
foxhunters to keep the evil vermin that was the fox at bay, the English
countryside would be no more. The fox, that hellish chimera of wolf, jackal,
tiger and ghoul/demon! werewolf, would multiply, growing in unstoppable
numbers, forming mighty packs and wreaking havoc across the land. Snatching
infants from their cots, devouring entire herds of sheep and cattle in a
hideous feeding frenzy, before moving on to destroy the towns and cities.

To ban
foxhunting was to do little less than herald in the End Times and welcome the
arrival of the Anti-Christ.

Blimey!

This
all came as a bit of a revelation to the townie. For one thing, the townie had
always believed that the greatest threat to a fanner’s crops came not from the
meat-eating fox but from the strictly vegetarian rabbit, which was, by a
curious coincidence, the all-but-staple diet of the fox. And surely only one
and a half per cent of the British populace actually lived in the country, and
the countryside only contributed three per cent to the Gross National Product.
And surely most farmers had guns? After all they were always pointing them at
townies who inadvertently picnicked upon their land. Couldn’t they simply shoot
the foxes?

It was
indeed a bit of a revelation, and one that served to pave over that
aforementioned divide which had for so long, er, divided the rural community
from its urban brother. Foxhunting provided full employment for the country
folk, and spared the town-dweller from the rabid attentions of the demonic fox
pack.

Harmony.

So
where did the fox farms come into this? Well, as I thought I’d explained, there
weren’t enough foxes to hunt.

It was
the town-dwellers’ fault. Their love of motor cars and motorways. You see, ten
times as many foxes are killed by motor cars than are killed by foxhunts, which
explains why country folk always protest so much about new motorways.

It’s
all so simple when it’s explained, isn’t it?

So my
Uncle Brian worked on a fox farm. It was one of the new ones. A fox factory
farm. My uncle was employed as a genetic engineer. The aim was to breed the
super-fox. A vegetarian fox that was a really slow runner, as so many
foxhunters are old and fat, just like their hounds.