David Charters: There is so little time between nursery rhymes and rock and roll

Jun 17 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THE soldier stood tall and he stood proud – his sword glistened and his moustache bristled, his legs stout and his shield defiant.

And the near-man examined him across the rolling field and the wooded hills of the battlefield, before, with a single dab of his long, thin brush, turning the soldier’s helmet silver, so that he could lead the charge.

One day soon, the near-man will be a full-man with a rasp in his voice and a rub on his chin and then, for a while, he will put his painted soldiers back in the box. Yes, the orange sun is rising and our 12-year-old son is blinking into the light of his early summer.

There is so little time between nursery rhymes and rock and roll.

Outside, though, it was already high summer, and the swell-bellied husbands were cursing lowly, as they read the instructions for the assembly of barbecue sets or flicked off the crown tops of beer bottles, while their wives sat, wide-legged, on the deckchairs; lowering their bra-straps, in hovering moments between decency and disaster – allowing them more fully to spread the dollops of sun lotion into raw flesh.

But my wife is by nature an indoor creature, whose natural habitat is the fashion store, where she joins women of a similar calling in ritualistic behaviour. Here, the urban equivalent of David Attenborough can watch from the shadows, as women twirl before long mirrors and their pale husbands sag.

The wives pick up and put back numerous garments, shaking their heads in despair, until they return to the mirror, parading a favoured item in various poses.

“Ssshh,” says the Attenborough in reverential tones. “Now, wait for their mating call.”

“I just don’t know. I can’t decide. Is it me?” she asks her slack-jawed man, who appears to have taken root on the floor. Each time he hears the question, the poor fellow nods his head uncontrollably, as if gripped by the palsy.

By contrast, my wife approaches the outdoors with ginger steps and the bewildered eyes of an estate agent to the stars, who has just been told to open a branch in Scunthorpe. “Are there any vacancies in Hell?,” he mutters, his expensive deodorant rallying to repel a surge of emotional sweat.

She can with consummate ease resist the temptation to follow the spoor of the vole. She does not by inclination rub noses with the natterjack toad, nor does she leap with the leveret. The earthy domain of the stoat remains a mystery to her and she does not respond to the cry of the greenshank. The sullen wildfowl marshes do not feel her tread. In short, she prefers the comforts of the lounge to the challenges of the wilderness.

But the sun was so tempting on this day that she ventured into our garden, wearing a rather fetching bikini. I had placed our loungers on the lawn.

As I slipped into sleep and my wife kept a look-out for any uninvited representatives of God’s Creation, our son continued painting his Roman and Gallic soldiers on the table inside.

Suddenly, the peace was pierced by a scream of such volume that an angel tripped on a cloud and burglar-alarms sounded in the village.

“Good grief, it’s a snake!” said my wife. “Get rid of it. It’s a viper!”

No, sweetheart,” I said, reassuringly. “That’s an earthworm. Admittedly a very big one, but it’s a worm.”

I stared in admiration, as it advanced with extraordinary zeal across the grass, evidently driven by the power in its saddle, before drilling into the ground and disappearing.

“It may be a worm, but I still don’t like it,” said my wife. “I must shop to recover.”

“Don’t worry. The worm is a robust fellow, generally unencumbered by the delicate sensibilities of the consumptive poet in mid-flow,” I said, making light of the situation.

At that moment, my nostrils began twitching, irritated by the pollen, which is as much a feature of English summers as the smell of frying burgers and the hum of the bee.

I walked into the house for a tissue. “What do you think of my battle?” asked our son when I reached the table. I replied with a mighty and irresistible sneeze. What a massacre! Dead Romans and Gauls lay everywhere.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It has taken you hours to paint all those men and stand them up.”

“Never mind, Dad,” he said. “Would you help me put them back?”

So it was that we knelt on the floor, man and boy again, though, in the background, I could hear rock and roll music.

LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk