Mrs Ockleton's Rainbow Kite and other Tales E-Book

Garry Burnett

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Inspired by the music of Gordon Giltrap, Mrs Ockleton's Rainbow Kite and other Tales is an illustrated collection of ten charming short stories by Garry Burnett. Drawing from Garry's memories of growing up in East Hull, these stories deal with a wide variety of themes, including death and bereavement, bullying, friendship, family relationships and growing up. These short insights into an urban working class community and the fantasies and cruelties of childhood will make you think and laugh out loud.

Leseprobe

Mrs Ockleton’s Rainbow Kite and Other Tales

‘Let’s hear thy story Thomas Leaf,’ said the tranter, ‘I never knew you were clever enough to tell a story. Silence, all of ye, Mr Leaf will tell a story.’

THOMAS HARDY, Under the Greenwood Tree

Dedicated to:

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Dedication

Foreword: Music and Stories by Gordon Giltrap

Introduction by Peter Thomas

Other Tales

1 A Yuletide Tale

2 Mr Gorman

3 Filthy Lucre

4 Uncle Kevin

5 The Man in Black

6 Egging

7 The Mariner’s Tale

8 Twenty-six Baboons

9 Billy the Cat

Mrs Ockleton’s Rainbow Kite

Glossary of local terminology (‘Hullisms’)

Copyright

Foreword: Music and Stories

My career as a creative musician started in the mid-1960s with the release of my debut album Gordon Giltrap in 1966. This was a mixed affair of songs and guitar solo instrumentals. Between 1966 and 1973 I recorded a further three albums in a similar vein but then decided to pursue an entirely instrumental direction. The result was the critically acclaimed Visionary album in 1976. This album was inspired by the poems and paintings of the visionary English genius William Blake. I was particularly moved by three of his most famous poems: The Ecchoing Green, London and one of his most profound works The Price of Experience.

Even though I have written more tunes than I care to remember, the creative process is still a mystery to me and to try to explain how it all works is nigh on impossible. When taking a piece of literature for example as the seed for inspiration, I try to picture what the poem is describing and to put myself in that picture. With Blake of course it’s a lot easier, particularly with his more descriptive works such as the aforementioned poems.

I related particularly to Blake and his inherent ‘Englishness’ and my own style of composing, drawing my inspiration from lute music and the music of Elgar and Vaughn Williams. I can’t begin to say whether I hit the mark with some of my interpretations of the masters’ works but one can only try to get inside the mind of a tortured genius such as Blake and hope that any scholars of the man will forgive any shortcomings on the composer’s part!

I have always been an intuitive creator and this is the only way it works for me. I like to think that in some romantic way that if the man were still alive today that he would approve of an ‘intuitive’, sincere approach to his beautiful words.

Once the Visionary album gained acceptance, it made sense to follow a similar path with the more contemporary work of Harry Willcock and Alan Aldridge, and The Peacock Party album was released in 1981. This again was a mixture of text and illustration, a particularly rich source of inspiration for a writer of tunes like myself.

Of course the reverse can also work in the creative process.

The pieces featured behind Garry Burnett’s wonderful, innocent, gentle, uplifting story ‘Mrs Ockleton’s Rainbow Kite’ was inspired by music composed for my Troubador album. Garry was so moved by my compositions ‘Rainbow Kites’, ‘On Camber Sands’ and ‘Kaz’ that his imagination was fired.

GORDON GILTRAP June 2005

Introduction

The short story is a subtle form – and more demanding than it may seem at first. Unlike the novel where narrative can uncoil and meander as life does itself, it requires a tight discipline of economical writing. In the short story, everything must be done purposefully – settings established, characters introduced and conclusions worked towards in a very short space. The craft of the storywriter is to invest the little with significance of the large. Garry Burnett’s stories have this discipline of condensed material, making them short insights into large human affairs.

Garry grew up and went to school in East Hull and many of his stories draw upon his memories of his family, his neighbours and his classmates. East Hull, however, is not just a geographical setting in these stories. It’s true that the landscape of the stories – Holderness Road, the old railway line to Withernsea or the channels of the Humber Estuary – is specifically local but the landscape that really matters is the social landscape of these stories. East Hull is a setting where life is permeated with the culture of its community – the bingo, the chip shop, the ‘diddle ’em’ and the ‘ten-foot’ – and these are part of a recognisable wider national culture.

Unlike much autobiographical writing, and unlike much writing that springs from a known community, Garry’s work is no rose-spectacled recall of an idealised past. The stories frequently touch on the cruelties of school and family life, as they do with the cruelties of life itself, like the child whose loss of eye and tooth make him doubly handicapped. The stories are in no way a romanticised picture of an urban working-class community. They are sharply realistic and unsentimental.

Many of them draw on the raw and tender parts of childhood – not just pains, but dreams and fantasies, affections and embarrassments. Garry Burnett understands childhood the way few writers do. He understands the way that adults often callously misjudge the needs and hopes of youngsters. The afflicted youth just mentioned, for example, is known to all as ‘Dog’ because of the inability to even sound his own name ‘Doug’. Such unintentional cruelties and ironies outside the politically correct are the distinctive mark of these stories. They are part of the comedy and tragedy of human life. Garry’s warmth and affection for characters is intelligent rather than sentimental. He understands that pathos and poignancy are not a matter of emotional wallowing in the agonies of the psyche. His special gift for pathos and poignancy works dangerously close to comedy. Like the great creations of flawed character, Pickwick, Falstaff, Del Trotter or Captain Mainwaring, his characters too are shaped by the absurd collisions of ego and circumstance, of ambition and failure. His Uncle Kevin, in his own eyes a stylish winner in Life’s lotteries is, in reality, a walking example of dire failure, but he is sustained against the pain of reality by unperishing self-esteem. There is something of the comic hero about him and others who dare to live their dreams, deaf to the scorn and derision of others, tenaciously holding on to what they want to be whilst driving an ice-cream van whose tune is the theme to Lawrence of Arabia.

What Garry shows us is what Wordsworth knew, that the child is the father of the man. The cruelly handicapped child acts out his dream in the school playground as he pretends to be a bus, zealously developing his repertoire of engine and ticket-collecting vocal effects. In this, he is as one with the chip-shop owner who lives out his dream of being a Confederate General as he doles out skinless haddock or a portion of fries in the ‘chippy’.

It’s Wordsworth, too, who is the source of so much of what makes these stories more than sketches. In ‘Egging’, Garry draws on Wordsworth’s links between childhood pranks and the dawning awareness of a larger world of conscience and responsibility as two boys hunting eggs are brought suddenly and shockingly to an awareness of matters looming larger than hobbies and pranks.

There are other links a reader may make with writers who have explored the territory of childhood and community – Sid Chaplin, Bill Naughton and Dylan Thomas come quickly to mind. What I think Garry has, uniquely in this collection, is a comic gift for the parochial epic.

My own lasting memory of Garry’s stories is his reading of ‘Twenty-six Baboons’, a story in which the exotic location of a safari collides with the huddle of a chip-shop queue, yoking the lewd vulgarity of the baboons with the disgust of the voyager and the more wildly exotic imagination of the chip-fryer. That and the unforgettable chill of the Christmas story in which a child confronts a mysterious alter-ego. Garry the writer is also Garry the teacher. What he teaches in these stories is warmth, tolerance and the need to dream with our feet on the ground. If he makes you laugh, it’s not laughter at individuals or Hull – it’s laughter at the quirks and follies of the species.

Thank you Garry.

PETER THOMAS University of Hull