EVENING had turned to night and the moon was high and proud, like a great cheese of light, when the man walked into the country pub with his story and his wild hair, his beckoning grey eyes and his punch-knuckled hands, whose thumbs had been hardened by rubbing the earth from the roots of vegetables.
And with those hands he took one long drink from a dimpled pot of beer, before walking to the low-burning coal fire, where his friends sat at a large wrought-iron table with a round top. One pulled out an oval-backed, slatted chair and it scraped on the stone-tiled-floor, as hard as the pews in the brown chapel, where snoozing was forbidden and the tall preacher roared about redemption in the old language. The man took this seat and everyone could see that he had a story to tell. They sat as quiet and still as hedgehogs in hibernation, as he drew threads of tobacco from an ancient green tin and rolled them into a cigarette paper, which he sealed with a lick. “You know, I have just seen something extraordinary,” he said. “In all my years of walking here by the banks of the stream, I have never seen anything like it.”
He had a pint, a smoke and his audience, so with a voice that was unexpectedly musical, he started the story, which was relayed to me many years later, when I still wore short pants and wellies and the stream was a place of brambles, fiery gorse and quick water with deep pools for the lurking trout.
But that night on the banks, where the grass was wet and long and greasy, a big bullfrog had been dreaming. From nowhere, a water rat pounced and closed its needle teeth around the frog’s throat. That should have been it, hardly a contest at all. Nature had chosen her winner from the great mysteries of creation, but this frog had a survival instinct like no other and his mighty back legs, which could propel him through the air at such speed and over such distances, kicked into the soft under-belly of the rat, lifting him in the air. Thump, shummp, thump. The rat held on. Time and time again the frog kicked, his energy and blood seeping away, his round eyes staring in bewildered desperation. But the rat was taking terrible punishment as well. His belly split, exposing his guts. Finally, in an immeasurable moment, life left the rat and he fell into the fast water, leaving the frog to slither into the undergrowth to die, alone, by his stream, the victor.
Of course, I cannot promise you that every detail of the story is true, but that does not matter to me. Its spirit is true and it is the spirit of the underdog reversing the expectations of the smug and the conventional. Throughout history, I have supported the underdog. I fought with the Carthaginians in their three epic wars with Rome. Carthage lost each one, but Hannibal became a hero, whose name is still greater than that of any Roman. I charged with the Cavaliers as they fired romance at the cannons of the Roundheads. I dabbed my bloody brow with the tartan of the Jacobites. I sang with Lonnie when Elvis was all the rage. Most of all, I rode with the Indians in their doomed fight against the cowboys and the US Cavalry. And, in the quiet times, I still see their feathered ghosts on the high hills and in the lush valleys and hear their horses shudder in the night.
Now, with a general election coming into view, there is much talk about the divisions in our country – between the rich and the poor, the triumphant and the forlorn, the capitalists and the socialists. Politicians in fanciful mood tell us how they would heal these differences. Well, in the practical world, these things may matter. But, in the world of the emotions, we are divided by those who stick up for the underdog and those who move seamlessly into the camps of the powerful. You can see it happening from the playground to the boardroom by way of the arenas of sport. An old editor of mine, a curmudgeonly fellow with a strangely sympathetic smile, once read one of my articles: “There are good causes and bad causes,” he said, “but you always go for the lost cause.”
It is true, but many of us do. We are the doomed romantics of the lost cause.
LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk
