Saturday, April the 29th, 2006
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Earlier in the year we published The Immense Duckpond Pamphlet, a story in twenty-six daily(ish) episodes. This seemed to be popular with readers, harking back to the days when fiction was routinely published in serial form, so today we begin a second serialisation with the first episode of Testimony Of A Tundist. This tale first appeared in pamphlet form in 1993, is long out of print (of course), and copies are so rare that even the author doesn't have one.
I became a Tundist at the age of twenty-six. I have never regretted it. Oh, my life has not been easy. I have been racked by doubts, spat upon, consumed by misery, poked at with sticks, ridiculed, accused of numberless crimes, and pelted with pebbles. Yet through years of torment, Tundism has sustained me. It has been a solace and a joy, comforted me, emboldened me, kept me whole. I wear with pride the Tundist's Vest.
What makes one embrace Tundism? There is no simple answer to the question. In my forties, for quite unrelated reasons, I was confined to a dank and grim oubliette for a period of six years, during which time, with little else to do but bite my fingernails and bash rodents with my spoon, I analysed the forces which had impelled me, with ever increasing certainty, towards that unforgettable day when, smoke billowing from the funnels, I donned the Vest, and choirs sang.
My childhood was a happy one, marred only by insect swarms and my father's occasional outbreaks of pumice mania, when he would charge wildly around the house hurling pumice stones at invisible foes. We were a close-knit family. I was the youngest of eight children. My sisters were strange, flushed, lovelorn, towering, bloodthirsty and prim (in that order). My brother I hardly remember; he was much older than me, and joined the post office when I was four, and we saw little of him thereafter, though he kept in touch through letters, often twice daily, recounting his adventures. It is a pity that his handwriting was illegible.
We grew up in a ramshackle cottage on farmland. If my parents had any connection with the farm, they never told me about it. My mother was something in the world of amateur entomology. She regularly received envelopes full of flies in the post, and would spend her afternoons pinning each fly to a gigantic baize noticeboard in the pantry. Once or twice a year she would go off to distant towns to attend entomological gatherings; sometimes one or two of the children would be allowed to accompany her. I have a vivid memory of sitting on a stool at the back of a cold and cavernous hall, somewhere on the outskirts of Blot, while Mama stood behind a lectern at the front, addressing a few dozen enthusiasts. I had no idea what she was talking about.
Of my father, there is little I can say which is not already in the public record. He lived an obscure and blameless life until the terrible day when, celebrating his sixtieth birthday, he was arrested under the provisions of the Suspicious Foreign Maps Act. Once the press got wind of it, he didn't have a chance.
By then, of course, I had already become a Tundist. I must go back ten years or more. I had left home at fifteen, with my parents' blessings, and joined a troupe of hot-air-ballooning minstrels. I remember those years with unalloyed pleasure. Our balloon would touch down in some field, we hardly cared where, and we would clamber out of the basket, clutching our lutes, crumhorns, sackbuts and shawms, and skip frolicsome into the nearest village, where we would commandeer a square, or green, or bandstand, and perform our spritely songs in return for money, victuals, ale, trinkets, and whatever else a delighted populace could bestow upon us.
It was a glorious life for a youngster, and I was devastated when, at nineteen, I was forced to leave the troupe through injury. One teeming day in August 19--, I fell from the balloon-basket and broke my back. I have been in a wheelchair ever since. I spent the best part of a year in hospital, slowly coming to terms with my new situation. I frittered the time away, driving the other patients crackers with my sackbut, until it was confiscated by a gruesome janitor. Never much of a reader in those days, I made little use of the hospital library. I invented card games, and taught them to my fellow invalids. I developed a taste for reckless gambling, using counters, until I had impoverished myself and any future children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren I may ever dandle upon my knee. I learned to paint facetious watercolours. My prim and towering sisters visited me. My mother sent me a fly.
Discharged a week after my twentieth birthday, I returned briefly to the family cottage, but grew rapidly disgruntled, and struck off alone, renting a hut in the grounds of a fireworks factory in Frump Harbour, where, through the offices of one of my old ballooning pals, I had been offered a job entertaining the workers during their lunch breaks by strumming upon a banjo and howling. Life was squalid but bearable. My hut was often overrun with weasels, squirrels and shrews. I had no running water, and the only heating was a formidable and rather alarming oil-burner which had been abandoned—judiciously, I thought—by a previous occupant of the hut. Each morning I was woken by a gang of corncrakes, their raucous cries skirling across the factory pond. I was not exactly happy, but I was content. Then, one dismal morning in November, still in my pyjamas, I met a Tundist.
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