Jottings of Jock
Page 29
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DERE FELLOW KNIGHTS OF THE ROAD, Well, chapses, one an' all, yoors trooly is scribinating these. 'ere jottings this month with a sore an' aching brest. This aforesaid is caused (a) through the thought of us Knights and them other Knights, what happen to be foreigners, blowing each other to bits when all the time 'we ain't got no personal anemossity, and (b) through walking into an oblitered (you heard) tailboard of a van during one of them indigo black-outs, and going base over apex down an excavation.
Altogether its bin a real stew-pan of
• a month. What with first sitting around for what seemed like years at a first-aid station awaiting for sumink horrible to happen, and then hareing round, like a continential porter what's got scent of a female millionaire tourist with 17 cabin trunks, a carrying of plus-loads of sand and gravel, yoors trooly don't hardly know wether he's coming or going.
ENCOURAGEMENT So, fellers, Jock profers the following jottings so as to act, as it were, as helper springs for drooping spirits.
When all these air raid warnings and other temper teasers make the week seem longer nor what it seems when yer on a early morning fish-collection contract, jest remember them paw drivers what lived in Mesop (you know, boys, where we swopt jam tin labels for oranges and told old Joey they was El notes) about 6,000 years ago (which is very nigh 15 years afore Ole Joe's father was born) where they had a war what went on for 2,000 years, ANOTHER RATION Two thousand years must have seemed a long time to get a chariot raid warning every other night. An' when that war was over, swelp me, if they didn't start up another one, Only this one' was of short duration only. It was the first war to end war—it only lasted jest over 1,000 years.
EXTRA HELPER SPRING
Mind you them wars wasn't the same as what we have to-day. Them ancient fellers was a crude bunch of boys what
jest waded into each other because they wanted to pinch the other blokes' land, cattle and / or his missis.
Them lads was uncivilized. They hadn't reached the high ethical viewpoint of overpowering another nation and seizing all the land jest to maintain the peace of the world. So keep a stout heart and a level head lads, because yoors trooly have got private information to shou that the supply of sand won't last more than
about 250 years at the zate it's being loaded at present—and for the love of Mike keep a sharp look out for special reinforced, iron-tipped, horizontal tailboards during black outs.
Don't fergit to bring the old wagon to the peace conference!
FROM THE HOME FRO NT Young Ginger has bin on hospital duty so long that he can now take a battery reading with a hypodermic needle instead of an ordinary hydrometer syringe. FOURTH STANZA
And then, numbskulls, the 1,000 years war which was between them Egyptians and the Sumerians was brought to a suddin end because the Persians, what was the tuftest bunch the world had ever seed (up til then) started out to fight both the other two. (Our local undertaker sea that things ain't what they was.) This load of gangsters didn't believe in no long wars. They jest cleaned up the other two armies in a little under 500 years.
GEOLOGICAL COMMENT 'Struth, ain't it a real corker where all this sand keeps coming from, chapses? You would think as how old Mother Earth was a congealed foreshore, to see what sum of them sand and ballast contractors keep getting out of her innards.
Think of all the sand what our forefathers put into them hour glasses, and then there was the egg-timer (present from Margate) age, and now us Knights of the Road (unhonoured and unsung, as per usual) is carrying it so fast to town that there ain't enoughbags 'to put it in.
Ole Fred what's bin on evacuation duty and have had to spend a couple of nights with a wet sand bag for his pillow, ses that he now perfers a sand bag to the regular and orthodox collection of quills and other birds' bones what is usually referred to as a feather bolster.
MORE ENCOURAGEMENT
Well, chapses one an' all, us Knights have got to keep our chins up and carry on, because these modern wars is going to look like Hamlet without the ghost (what means a ruddy washout) if there wasn't nobody to keep all them complicated mechanical contrivances on the move. (An official communikue have jest come in to say that the filling in of road traffic records is still got to be performed by hand as heretofore.) FROM MOTHER HUBBARD " What are you looking for? " "Nothing."
." You'll find it over there—in my petrol ration book."