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    Permanent Moments: A Fictional Autobiography
    Permanent Moments: A Fictional Autobiography
    Permanent Moments: A Fictional Autobiography
    Ebook140 pages1 hour

    Permanent Moments: A Fictional Autobiography

    By Stephen Mitchell

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    About this ebook

    When clearing out his mothers fl at Stephen discovers a tin of old photographs under her bed. Each image evokes a memory of childhood and we get to meet the people who inhabit those memories wayward friends and sensible friends, strict teachers and hopeless teachers, ugly girls and gorgeous girls, Aunts who are not Aunts and Uncles who are not Uncles and a grandfather who revels in the art of mischief.

    In this funny and sometimes moving novella Stephen Mitchell wonders whether our memories can really be relied upon to provide an accurate reconstruction of our childhood years and especially those of an ordinary child growing up in the North of England in the 1960s.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris AU
    Release dateDec 12, 2013
    ISBN9781493121458
    Permanent Moments: A Fictional Autobiography
    Author

    Stephen Mitchell

    Stephen Mitchell's many books include the bestselling Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, and The Second Book of the Tao, as well as The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, The Gospel According to Jesus, Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Meetings with the Archangel.

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      Book preview

      Permanent Moments - Stephen Mitchell

      Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Mitchell.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      Rev. date: 12/04/2013

      To order additional copies of this book, contact:

      Xlibris LLC

      1-800-455-039

      www.Xlibris.com.au

      Orders@Xlibris.com.au

      514038

      Contents

      Dear Reader

      The Tin of Memories

      The Circular Movement of Wooden Livestock

      The Law of Gravity

      Fun With Effervescent Powder

      Millwater Germs

      On the Click of the Box-Brownie’s Shutter

      The Dead Fox by the Fireplace

      Batman’s Autograph

      Growing Up Behind The Toilets

      Mr Twatkinson

      Thank You, Sir

      Christmas With Rodgers & Hammerstein

      Big-Boned Girls & Oxo Cubes

      Fun With Offal

      Crabs & Scabs

      The Elasticated Waistband of My Underpants

      Lust In Three Dimensions

      Everybody Smoked Back Then

      A Midwinter Night’s Dream

      Endless Possibilities

      Acknowledgements

      for my wife

      Jackie Owen

      and our children

      Jessica

      Oliver

      and

      William

      No matter how miserable I may be

      you can always be depended on to make me laugh.

      Dear Reader

      00%20Dear%20Reader.jpg

      I’ll bet you’re wondering why this book is called Permanent Moments.

      Well then, let me explain:

      Back in 1979 I read a review of a book called Jailbird by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. It was, the review said, a novel about the forgotten man of the Watergate Affair writing his memoirs from prison. I’d never heard of Kurt Vonnegut before but the book sounded pretty interesting and so I headed off into town to buy it. I was living in Stafford at the time and it was not (and still isn’t as far as I’m aware) the cultural capital of the world. Staffordshire County Council banned the showing of Monty Python’s Life of Brian in all its cinemas in 1979, and in 1984 it advised its bookshops not to sell Raymond Briggs’ brilliantly acerbic picture book The Tin Pot Foreign General and The Old Iron Woman.

      Needless to say I couldn’t find a copy of Jailbird anywhere. What I did find in a second-hand bookshop, though, was Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

      It changed my life. It changed the way I thought. It made me look at life in a completely different way.

      But what’s it about?

      The best way I can think of to describe what it’s about is to recall a memory I have of a book group I joined in the South of England back in the 1990s. When I say book group what I really mean is a gathering of literary snobs. There were about ten people in the group and they met each week and discussed the book they had been reading. The rules were that each person in the group got a turn in choosing a book. The members of the group were open to any kind of genre—or so they said. Their choice of reading ranged from pretentious unreadable prize winning books to ancient unreadable classics to Anna Karenina. When it came to my turn I chose Slaughterhouse-Five because I thought the group would benefit from reading something a little bit different.

      They sounded very interested when I told them that the book was based on Vonnegut’s own experiences as an American prisoner-of-war in Dresden. When the allies bombed it back to the stone-age Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were held in an underground slaughterhouse and the experience understandably deeply affected him. The novel’s central character is Billy Pilgrim and Vonnegut writes himself in as a minor character. As I was explaining how, during the bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim is unexpectedly kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, I noticed that everyone had stopped listening to me. All through the bit about Dresden they’d oohed and aahed and had been taking notes but as soon as I mentioned aliens they all put their pens down and closed their note books.

      I’m sorry Steve, the group leader said, but we don’t read science fiction in this group.

      That’s right, said her husband, we consider it childish and immature.

      But the rules of your group say that we are committed to reading all types of book, I reasoned, and that all our choices should be read no matter what the genre.

      Not if it’s science-fiction.

      "But they burned this book in American universities because of the things he alluded to. It’s one of the most influential books of all time. It ranks alongside books like Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22 and The Dice Man."

      But it is still science-fiction, snapped the group leader, "and we don’t read science-fiction"

      It’s not really science-fiction. The sci-fi element is a metaphor for what was happening in America at the time. It’s a humanist book.

      I knew I shouldn’t have said sci-fi. No matter how much I implored them to read the book, after I’d mention the term sci-fi they were just not prepared to listen to me anymore.

      Science-fiction was bad enough—but sci-fi!

      It was a shame because they might have picked up on some of the book’s wisdom and maybe it might have changed their lives too. They were all getting on in years and Vonnegut’s philosophy of life and death might have cheered them up a bit.

      During his captivity Billy Pilgrim is taught that it would be silly to cry at someone’s funeral because that person hasn’t really died—he just appeared to die and each moment of his life—past, present and future—is still alive because those moments are all permanently fixed in time. The Tralfamadorians believed that it would be illusory to think that one moment followed another and that when that moment was gone it would be gone forever.

      I think Kurt Vonnegut also believed that.

      I know I do.

      But none of that mattered to the book group.

      The group leader turned to her devoted followers and asked, "Does anyone else have any sensible suggestions?"

      "Why don’t we read Anna Karenina again," someone said.

      Regards

      Stephen Mitchell

      PS: The book you are about to read contains no elements of science-fiction.

      to the memory of William Owen (1898-1973)

      Above the fireplace in the front room of my grandparent’s house, secured in a gilt-edged frame, a portrait of a young soldier held pride of place. He was dressed in a uniform bearing the insignia of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. His square face was youthful and fresh and it framed an angular nose, beneath which a disarming smile beamed with optimism. He had thin eyebrows; they were barely visible, almost feminine and his eyes sparkled with mischief whenever you looked at them. The portrait was painted by some unknown artist using pastel colours on white silk. Concealed beneath the silk was the original photograph, taken in 1915, two days before the soldier’s sixteenth birthday and three days before his departure to France.

      The Tin of Memories

      01%20The%20Tin%20of%20Memories.JPG

      I found the old Quality Street tin under my mother’s bed when I was clearing out her flat and as I blew the dust of decades from its lid it immediately brought back a vivid memory of one Christmas from my childhood. The tin used to sit on top of a glass cabinet full of glass animals and only ever left its lofty perch once a day where its lid would be removed and the chocolates and toffees inside would be offered to family and friends (only one each, mind).

      Aside from the paintings of Regency soldiers and their ladies that adorned the tin’s curved edge, there was nothing else to indicate the treasures it contained and so when I removed the lid I was surprised to find a collection of eighteen photographs, all of which featured me in some form or other. I also found a photograph of my grandfather and a silk portrait that had been expertly copied from it, which was rolled

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