The Short Biography of Thomas Pickering Bell (630 hits)
Category: Quotes & StoriesLabels: fiction
Rating: 1.68 on 23 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Flash Harry (View user info) at 2008-06-18 10:03:29 EDT
With a thankful nod to http://www.ubersite.com/m/117241
Thomas Pickering Bell, husband, son, father, footballer, pugilist, womaniser, cuckold, Member of the British Empire, fierce Scottish nationalist, veteran of the First World War, conscientious objector to the Second, poet, painter, drinker, thief, admirer of Dickens, enemy of the Welsh, eccentric flake, dogmatic Presbyterian, noted orator, tobacco chewer, conspiracy theorist, confidence trickster, card player, impressionist, stand-up comedian, billiards hustler, dog lover, undiagnosed dyslexic, uninformed politician, private rebel, suspected Communist, questionable inventor, burlesque enthusiast, moustache owner, outlandish liar, sometimes preacher, was born on a grubby kitchen table in Glasgow's Maryhill district in 1899, to Thomas Sr. and Agnes.
Unfortunately, his feet caught in the butter-dish, and he spent his formative minutes sprawling on the kitchen floor, gasping for breath and farting excitably.
Thomas' early life was spent as mediator between his feuding parents, who could never decide what he ought to be called. His father, Thomas Sr., insisted that his first-born son's name ought to be shouted from the rooftops with a lung-shuddering roar: "THOMAAAAS!" he would call from the tenement window. Agnes, however, was a gentlewoman, who preferred a quieter, less vowelly pronunciation: "Th'm's," she would whisper, lest the patriarch overhear her, and beat her with his slippers.
Variations came and went, through 'Tom,' 'Tommy,' 'Tam,' 'Tommo' and 'T-Dog.' One day, When Thomas was fifteen and old enough to talk for himself, his parents asked him what he wished to be called. It is written in his diaries that he told them that he couldn't care less, and wished they would both boil their tongues off. He longed, so the story goes, for his sixteenth birthday or the outbreak of war, whichever came first, so that he could flee from their infernal clutches.
Young Thomas' worth as a soothsayer nearly doubled in value, as war broke out the very next week. Britain suddenly engaged in combat with the rest of Europe, so it seemed, for vague reasons he could not quite fathom surrounding a dead politician in a far-off land.
"Ye're too bluidy young tae jine up THOMAAAS!!!" snarled his father when told of his scheme. "Thu Ermy'll no tak' ye!"
But Thomas Pickering Bell was not a fellow to be told otherwise, once his mind was set on something. He plucked his pubis to make a fake moustache, and sauntered down to the recruitment hall full of bravado and breast-milk (the Bells could not afford to keep their own cattle, and so Agnes had given up the elasticity of her breasts to keep her family in milk for the past fifteen years. Thomas Sr. had nearly caused a riot when, as her son turned eight years old, the drained mother had suggested weaning him off the stuff. "Wean 'im aff it?" bellowed the sweet-toothed father. "Ye'll dae nuthin' o' the sort, wummin! Chrissakes, whit d'ye expect me tae huv wi' ma tea?! Mulk fae a coo!? Ah widnae touch it. Durty heifers, them bluidy coos.").
It was remarkably easy to enlist in the Army, it transpired. They opened the doors and told the men to pile into the hall, wherein they would be measured, asked their age, have their testicles manhandled and issued with a pack containing everything a soldier in His Majesty's Army could wish for. Thomas stood on his tip-toes, bluffed over his age and told the man that his balls had in fact dropped, it was just that his 'hoose wis freezin', an' they're hidin' fae the cauld.'
Before he knew it, he was rumbling along in a vast train, headed for the Northern coast of France.
As shells crackled overhead, and howitzers sent deadly shrapnel streaking across the sky, Thomas found himself scurrying along worn pathways, darting beneath trees, and praying to the Lord above for his life to be spared. En route to the front line, you see, it had been noticed that Private Bell was somewhat shorter, and less hairy than he had been in the recruitment hall. When they were handing out cumbersome bolt-action rifles, piecing together giant machine guns and giving impromptu tutorials on the operation of mustard gas bombs, young Thomas was saddled with a shoulder strap carrying many flasks.
"BELL!!!" snapped the Commander. "You, son, have the most important job in the whole wide war - gettin' water fae the river back to the troops on the front line." He placed a strong hand on the boy's shoulder. "Dinnae fuck it up."
Private Bell, laden with moleskin flasks of dirty river-water, dodged between the trees, shuddering at the trembling explosions and gagging at the hideous screams that rung around the countryside like the peals of death.
His diaries, written as he recovered from his wounds in hospital, note that he neither felt, nor heard the explosion that maimed him. He saw it clearly enough, apparently, being so moved as to record:
"The very earth underneath my feet seemed to roll towards me like a wave. I had seen the devilish weapon pierce the ground like a dagger, but somehow I felt that it had plummeted a safe distance from where I stood. I was wrong. I was peppered with rocks and boulders that spewed out from the ground, and consumed by a thick, foggy air of indescribable heat. My eyes were already closed, and my consciousness fading, I am sure, when my knees buckled, and I was tossed into the air by the blast, like a rag from a bridge. I recall not landing, nor waking. The first thing I remember after the explosion was babbling pitifully to the man who carried me to safety, revealing that I was, in fact, just a minor, and begged to be allowed home..."
And sent home he was. Once Thomas admitted that he was but fifteen years old, the Government was so keen to cover up the potential controversy that he was awarded with the Mons Star for his efforts, and later made a Member of the British Empire by the King.
His injuries were, thankfully, temporary. Once his eyesight had improved and his skin grown back, Private Bell was dispatched from London back to Glasgow in a first-class coach, a sixteen year old war hero, whose battle-scars afforded him celebrity status among the young fillies of Maryhill.
The post-war years went well for Thomas. He found a part-time job at the famous Clyde shipyards, and was supplemented for the rest of his life by the British Army with an annual wage that meant he would never have to work particularly hard. He become a favourite of the harlots of Blythswood Square, regaling them with tales of his military accomplishments, the list of which grew by the month.
By the age of twenty-five, Thomas had lost his way in life. He drank too much, played cards for sums of money he could never afford, challenged those he owed money to boxing matches on the railroad, frequented pawn-shops to maintain his expensive habits of whisky, shoes and Dickens, sang for his supper at the Britannica Panopticon (at which point he struck up a lasting friendship with Stanley Laurel, who was starting out on his comedic voyage, treading the boards in front of the notoriously difficult, tomato-wielding Glaswegian crowds. A fanciful notion of Thomas' was that Laurel was so gleefully amused by his friend's particular brand of drunken leglessness that he incorporated the jelly-legged, clumsy nonsense into his acts, thus inventing the notion of 'slapstick'), and blossomed into a thorough disappointment to Thomas Sr. and Agnes.
As his reputation as a thick-headed pugilist grew, so too did his talent for another sport: football. In the late 1920s Thomas turned out for Dumbarton, for whom he was a regular contributor to the scoresheet, and then Albion Rovers, who already had a clinical goalscorer. Undeterred, Thomas tried his hand between the sticks, a position in which he turned out to be utterly useless. These were the days before gloves were worn, and the balls were of heavy leather, stinging his hands so badly that he claimed the pain was reminiscent of his days spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
He spent several years on the continent, during which time he claims to have wrestled Eric Arthur Blair (or, George Orwell) for a half-loaf of bread by the banks of the Seine in Paris. He returned to Britain penniless and half-mad, and threatened to finally go to the papers to reveal the awful truth about his wartime experiences. This was in the 1930s, and the Government was receiving enough bad publicity through their feckless handling of a mad Austrian called Adolf Hitler, who was slowly gobbling up the mainland of Europe.
Thomas was told to name the price for his silence, and he did. With typical, brainless eccentricity, he demanded that a street in Glasgow be named after him, and so it came to be that Bell Street, adjacent to the old High Street and but fifty yards from the mediaeval centre of the town, Glasgow Cross, came to be so named.
When Spain erupted in Civil War, Thomas Pickering Bell spluttered with indignation. Apparently his old sparring partner, Orwell, was heading for the Iberian climes to fight the evil face of fascism. Desperate to get one over on the middle-class tramp, he travelled to Spain, intent on 'doing for Franco what the Americans did for democracy'. Thankfully, before he left, he sired a child, Thomas Bell III, my grandfather.
And into the sunset he strolled, with a hip-flask of alcohol and a tattered copy of 'David Copperfield' in his breast pocket, intent on partnering fascism to defeat an old nemesis. Franco lost, of course, and with his cause disappeared the great man known as Thomas Pickering Bell. Whether he survived, and lived out his days plundering the Barcelonistas of their moustache combs and hard-earned pesetas is a matter of conjecture, and mystery.
User Reviews
Submitted by loveinbrevity (user info) at 2008-07-21 11:23:13 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by woolfe (user info) at 2008-07-08 05:05:52 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Banjo (user info) at 2008-06-19 13:09:50 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Brilliant!!!
Submitted by Mr_Trollope (user info) at 2008-06-18 14:19:37 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Very entertaining.
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2008-06-18 14:12:04 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
That's entertainment!
Submitted by PayMeLater (user info) at 2008-06-18 13:21:06 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
No Comment
Submitted by experima (user info) at 2008-06-18 12:25:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
experima sandwich
Submitted by JoeyG (user info) at 2008-06-18 12:20:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by experima (user info) at 2008-06-18 12:12:50 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Chroniclysm (user info) at 2008-06-18 12:11:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This was quite good.
Submitted by X54 (user info) at 2008-06-18 12:06:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Very amusing! I think you hit the right balance between nonsense and... sense? (Except maybe for the part about Franco losing.) I thought the Dilford Tetley piece went overboard on the nonsense.
Submitted by F.J.Bell (user info) at 2008-06-18 12:05:29 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Ah, I see. Yes, a man of many talents and contradictions.
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2008-06-18 12:04:30 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
And he was a womaniser??
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2008-06-18 12:04:13 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by F.J.Bell (user info) at 2008-06-18 16:58:07 BST (#)
Ranking: 0
Um...no, there was no cheating mentioned in this...?
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Cuckold??
Submitted by no1hasdis (user info) at 2008-06-18 12:02:04 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Also worthy of a +2.
Submitted by F.J.Bell (user info) at 2008-06-18 11:58:07 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Um...no, there was no cheating mentioned in this...?
I don't know much about Yahoo Mail, never mind Error 17s. MS Outlook FTW!
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2008-06-18 11:52:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I haven't read it all yet, but they cheated on each other?
Also, why won't yahoo let me read mail? How does one over come an error 17?
Answer me geeks!
Submitted by Ltap (user info) at 2008-06-18 11:42:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by scourge (user info) at 2008-06-18 11:36:20 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
honestly i preferred phallic's, but this was certainly good enough for an uber +2
Submitted by Nellypaal (user info) at 2008-06-18 10:36:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Better than its inspiration, being as it was not full of lame jokes.
Submitted by Doodles (user info) at 2008-06-18 10:24:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Good
Submitted by Berty (user info) at 2008-06-18 10:23:45 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
"This was in the 1930s, and the Government was receiving enough bad publicity through their feckless handling of a mad Austrian called Adolf Hitler, who was slowly gobbling up the mainland of Europe."
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Yes, yes, all very good I'm sure, but I would like to set the record straight regarding old Neville.
Basically after the Nazi's invaded Checkoslavakia Neville went over for a chinwag with Adolf. Adolof's position was "well we very much needed the industrial north of Checkoslavakia for reconstruction and now that we've appropriated all this we may as well have the south as well."
To which Neville replied, "I'm afraid that's just a little bit rum, old chap, the Checks will never stand for it and then where will we be? No, I think the best thing is if you hold tight where you are and see if you can't come to some manner of pleasant aggreement with them, eh?"
"Ya, that is reasonable. It is good to know that you're such a fine friend of the German peoples."
"Of course, old boy, of course."
Neville then came back to make that whole "peace in our time" soundbite and THEN went to Parliament to get them to put all the money that had been going into rebuilding Britian following WW1 into rebuilding the army, which was in a sorry state, because he realised Adolf was barking mad and set on world domination. It's just a shame that his delaying action, which involved publically saying all this "peace in our time" guff, is what he's remembered for the most.
Submitted by LittleMonster (user info) at 2008-06-18 10:22:29 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fantastic work Sir!
Very Pratchett. Superb! It reminded me of something I read once towards the end. Can't fathom what it was, but it was great.