Dad and The Screaming Donkey. Scilly Isles 2. Written by Richard Alan Gardham, 1962.

Dad and The Screaming Donkey. Scilly Isles 2. Written by Richard Alan Gardham, 1962. Transcribed by Angela Gardham.

He lay there among a mass of ropes. Tony was apparently fed up with himself. He insisted on walking on his own but the way he pushed himself away, he didn’t seem as though he was really drunk; as soon as we let go of his arms and stopped supporting him his legs would wobble and he would collapse tangling himself up among a mass of boat ropes. By the time we got to the steps, I was fed up with the performance of someone who wasn’t really drunk at all. He reappeared half an hour later with out Bill’s best suit on and he seemed to have sobered up miraculously.

She sailed away surrounded by flags, waving and shouting relatives with joyful tears in their eyes. You couldn’t get a better send off than that, on the captain’s bridge, with all the island there to see them off. It was late. The music became fainter as I walked the dark lane from the gun emplacement. The noise of the sea quietly increased its lapping over the rocks. One could want to stay there forever. The lane became really dark, the tall edges towering black. I was wondering how things were at home, how Dad was -that bloody cancer-. I shouldn’t be here really. I should be at home. Then there was this terrible scream. I had never heard anything like it. My hair seemed to stand on end forever and I was cold all over. I thought “Jesus, somebody’s been murdered”. Some- thing moved behind the hedge and there appeared a donkey’s head. It screamed out again. It made me laugh a little. Funny, I’ve heard a donkey braying before but never screaming. Tony didn’t seem surprised when I told him about it.

A later self- reflection on cancer. Science says it’s the splitting of a single cell, but by Christ it does some damage! I dreamt one night that it was a pink chrysanthemum cancer, growing, pushing, with its reaching colourful petals. But I was looking at my horoscope in the evening news when I came across “cancer”; they say it’s the symbol of the crab – a bloody crab! I will not eat crab again unless I’m hungry – you self- gloating b……You can’t even deny yourself crab. Funny thing though – when you got that crab by diving in the Scillies and you were told it was an un-edible spider crab, you took it back into the deep water and let it go, even though they ridiculed you. I’ll hate it where ever It’s roaming about – you supreme animal you! Now you go to the extent of hating an old brainless crab…supreme, you fool.