Colonel Bogey

I have a small request: To get the most out of this tale, you need to listen to at least thirty seconds of the Colonel Bogey March, preferably the whistling version from the movie, Bridge Over the River Kwai. It’s necessary to do so because when it comes to language, music and attitudes, what’s in common usage for one generation is often abandoned by the next. And I can tell you, most of my generation are gradually dropping off the perch! So off you go to YouTube, or wherever and I’ll be here when you get back. Think of it as a sort of interactive story!

Enjoy that? Ok, the Colonel Bogey March was composed by Lieutenant F.J.Ricketts in 1914 and was popular with the British and Commonwealth troops, so much so that well before Alec Guinness became Obi-Wan Kenobi, he was Col. Nicholson in Bridge Over the River Kwai.  They whistled the tune, because back in 1957, it wasn’t the done thing to sing about sensitive parts of the male anatomy. But by the early sixties as a bunch of not so coy, budding forest rangers, we sang the words the World War Two troops had attached to the march without any bashfulness whatever. The song was among our extensive repertoire we sang during our long bus trips. Some were patriotic, some downright crude, some popular at the time, most bawdy and some we had heard our fathers sing.

To the tune of: Colonel Bogey.

Hitler, he only had one ball.

Goering has two but they are small,

Himmler has something Similar,

But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all!

Now if we can roll along just a few more years, to when my young wife joined the local Country Girls Club, which was the female version of Young Farmers Club. Later the clubs amalgamated, which was a sensible thing to do because even when separate, they combined most of their activities. And of course, as with any club, volunteer organisation or sporting body, there is a voracious need to source funds and one of the ways was to put a cabaret.

We started holding cabarets in our local, newly built hall. We worked hard for it, raising funds for the building materials by hay carting and most of us spent a week or three on its construction. The alcohol laws had only just been relaxed. See, the law of the land is there to nurture the population, except the alcohol laws which were there to protect the booze companies and their pubs! So previously at a social events there was no booze allowed in the hall! Instead, it was secreted in cars outside. The local constabulary was part of the community so he wore his blinkers, but care still had to be taken in case the sergeant turned up from town! 

Under the relaxed law, even for fundraising, we weren’t allowed to sell booze, but it was now allowed in the hall on the condition we included the cost of the booze in the price of the cabaret ticket! Here we were trying to raise a few bob for the club, but how on Earth can you calculate how much was going to be consumed over the night? Shrewdies from town could get a whiff of cheap booze and descend on us like a flock of bloody vultures! So much for relaxing the law and being people friendly!

Brave club members were therefore posted at the door, pitch forks at the ready - not really, but you get the picture. Despite these constraints handed down by the buffoons in Wellington, the school committee, the hall committee and the Country Girls/Young Farmers ran successful events attracting people form near and far – by far, I mean fifty kilometres! There evolved a bit of a competition among the organising committees to produce the best show, because after all a cabaret is more than a few tables with booze perched on them and a band playing dance music that few of us could stomp around the floor to!

I wasn’t exactly filled with glee when Mags came home from a committee meeting and told me that she had volunteered my services to be a stripper! I’m no Schwarzenegger! When it came to abs, I was more of a four-pack! And oh no, I couldn’t back out of it, Charlie, Ross, Lloyd and Jimmy were all going to be in it too! It was all planned and all we had to do was turn up on the night! There would be plenty of oil and greasepaint ready and we weren’t even allowed to confer beforehand!

Mags busied herself with preparations for the night, I was busy so took no notice other than giving her the evil-eye whenever I remembered what she’d got me into! On the night, we weren’t allowed any priming ‘because our timing might be out’ so we all turned up backstage sober as Judge bloody Judy!

After we stripped off our shirts, the ladies started painting us! A big eye over each boob, a big nose painted down our sternums and puckered lips around our navels! Around our waists went paper lookalike bow ties and they put huge top-hats over our heads, the brims resting on our shoulders. We had to put out hands on our hips so our arms looked like big ears on a big head! They shoved us towards the stage with instructions to push our belly-lips out and in as if we were whistling in time to a tape playing… you’ve guessed it, The Bridge Over the River Kwai aka Colonel Bogey!

The peepholes in the hat were hardly conducive to seeing, but we kept roughly in line like a bunch of can-can girls! Pushing our stomachs out and in, like a goofy Ronnie Ronalde! And during the third encore, Lloyd lost his hat! Hilarity reigned!

The Black Lab and the Lambs

Tragedy struck in our small valley leaving our near neighbour without a husband and with three young daughters to raise on her own! Her house is just three quarters of a mile from the main road, in a rural setting, so there is no street lighting and a young woman on her own with three daughters, had every right to feel vulnerable. As a security measure she decided to buy a dog. Of course the girls got to choose the cutest puppy this side of Cook’s Straight – and why not? They chose a black Labrador.

Everyone knows that Labradors are soft-mouthed and the only danger they present is to lick you to death. The attention given him by the girls did nothing to increase his ferocity, to make him useful as a guard dog. I’m not sure if I ever heard him bark, but anyway the family felt safe and that could only be a good thing. On rare occasions the dog would arrive in our yard and I would shoo him off home. Not angrily, but firmly.

To help pay the bills, the widow took in a boarder, a young fellow who was lucky enough to score a job at the sawmill. The sawmill sat squarely between the widow’s property and ours. During my forestry days I sold a lot of logs to the mill, was friends with the manager, who lived on site but I knew all the other workers quite well too. Back in the day, at our annual cricket match, we forestry lads would regularly give them a hiding! The mill boys seemed to think that their new recruit was going to fit in well.

Springtime was a busy time for me, because springtime is lambing time. I managed a tree nursery and spent fifty minutes driving to start my team at 7:30am, so my farming operation needed to be efficient. Sometimes when ewes give birth there are complications and they need assistance. I had a regime where I limited feed to the ewes over the last few weeks of gestation, before they gave birth. If there’s an abundance of feed, the lambs grow too quickly and large lambs are more likely to be problematic to birth. I saved pasture for the ewes and their new-born lambs because good feed equates to good lactating. It’s just management practice because if I had to lamb a ewe in the morning… well it’s a time consuming process and my job was my bread and butter.

When I arrived home at about six, or shortly after, I would do my rounds to check on my sheep and attend to any mothering up, or lambing tasks before darkness set in. Busy as I was, I began to notice some lambs missing. I took pride that most of my ewes had twins, but there would be a birth during the day, but only one lamb would be suckling. Or I had moved a ewe and her lambs onto the better pasture and one of her lambs would have disappeared!

It’s not unheard of for townies come out to steal the odd lamb for their kids to rear it on a bottle for a pet, but that might happen once in five years or so. I had lost seven during the first week of lambing! I’m a good enough tracker and for the life of me I couldn’t find anywhere anyone could have jumped the fence and if it was a hawk, there would always be a tell-tale sign. Wild pigs will take young lambs and wild pigs do occasionally come down from the hills but very rarely these days and they always leave sign.

The mystery was solved when Albert phoned me one evening. His son worked at the sawmill and he saw what was going on. The widow was away all day earning a crust and her daughters were at school, so they tied the black Lab up. The boarder, feeling sorry for the dog, as soon as everyone had left the house, returned to let him off his chain, to wander playfully around the mill yard. Albert’s boy saw the dog return to the mill with a lamb in his mouth and the boarder promptly quickly buried it in the sawdust heap, saying nothing!

I didn’t want to confront the widow, she had troubles to burn, and she had done the right thing by chaining the dog while she wasn’t at home. If I saw the dog on my property I had every right shoot it, but that too would bring woe to the widow and her daughters. So I stayed behind one day and sat with the dog until the boarder arrived to release him. I waved my finger at him!

Before the next lambing season, the widow took a job in another region, and the dog became an issue for her. They must have decided to put the dog down because the boarder came to my door one Saturday morning wanting me to shoot him! He did offer to do the burying. Here’s the thing: Because I shoot rabbits, stray cats, and because it was my job to hunt deer and pigs to protect the environment, the perception is I’m a callous bugger. Yet  I’m careful not to run bumble bees over with my lawnmower, I have three worm farms and if I’m digging or disturbing soil, I won’t let a single worm dry out! I told him that if I shot the dog, it might be a doing a favour for him and the widow, save a vet bill, but those girls would always remember me as the bugger that shot their pet!

Honesty, History and Humanity

 

I know Merv. Merv walked into an antique store where he saw a painting with a handwritten price tag that he knew was ten percent of its actual value. It was the school holidays and a schoolgirl was minding the store while the owner was off somewhere. Merv displayed a demeanour to show he wasn’t to be messed with and demanded the tagged price to be honoured. The girl shrugged and acquiesced. Merv boasted to his mates about his bargain, his swindle and how he had taken the girl down. As a point of sales law, Merv might have been within his rights. But morally? Well that depends on your point of view. Which begs another question: did the schoolgirl keep her holiday job? The painting didn’t alter Merv’s life one way or another but his use of power stimulated his ego which means, given the chance, he’s likely do it again.

Mugabe is out of office, but he demonstrates how power can corrupt.  I watched the cheering crowds we saw in the media, they are all dressed rather well, which suggests to me they have done ok under his regime. Despite all, cunning is a subtle manifestation feeding off power. I recall, my little cynic-button clicked in during my early years in Tanzania. Tanzania was the third poorest nation on Earth, but I noticed some people were very expensively dressed. I asked myself: how did they attain their wealth when everyone else was poor, and who did they stand on during their journey? Mugabe replaced a brutal, unfair system and when he became powerful, his regime became more brutal, more unfair. Doubtless the next one won’t change much.

But none of this random, it’s simply how we work as a species within nature, no different to other species on this planet. Dominance or power, and amassing whatever it takes to sustain it. I know people who, like anyone lacking privilege, were vocal about the evils of corruption. Perhaps jealous. However, a when they became responsible for project funds, they too took the bait. Wealth is recognised as power and the very rich never say they’ve earned enough, or stop accumulating, instead they take advantage of their good fortune and amass more. Sure some ease their conscience by tossing some to charity, but they wouldn’t sell their homes and downsize to help the needy.

The old letch Harvey what’s-his-name has brought an overdue issue to the fore, well, perhaps that’s the wrong terminology, more like certain women have brought him to the fore. ‘There is a new enlightenment,’ says Jane a local film director, adding, ‘it’s fairytail time and women are being believed and men are being fired!’ The reports say that he was indeed even worse than most of his ilk because his attention wasn’t welcomed. He thought he was so powerful, he thought he could get away with anything. Just the same what goes on in Hollywood is after all, Hollywood. The what-his-name issue isn’t going to tip the balance or change things hugely for females because doing flies in the face of natural law and instinct. It might be distasteful to think that way, but there we are. Nobody seemed to pillory Casanova, in fact the opposite! Yet he openly enjoyed touching girls as young as nine! The bloke from Coronation Street was acquitted of doing harm to young girls, but his boast was he has slept with a thousand women! Where did he get the time? And Beatty confessed to an over-vigorous appetite too! Maybe they were studs! Females aren’t so lucky when it comes to terminology.  

I attended a seminar about an organisation that provides assistance to ex-prisoners, to integrate them back into society. The biggest proportion of their clients are men, and the majority of them had sexually offended! We heard some horror stories! Walking out of the seminar with one of my fellows, he told me he felt embarrassed to be male. We were both in awe the organisation’s role, and of the two women presenters who had themselves faced abuse and experienced the tragedy of family members’ drug abuse. My mate wondered if it had been men who presented the seminar, would we have come out with different point of view. Point of view eh? A curious thing.

Superior beings or not, the laws of nature still rules us as a species. While we might be a few rungs up the evolutional ladder we have the same basic instincts as our ancestors for as far back as you want to go. Those same instincts I witness in my sheep, my cattle, the birds in my yard and even frogs in the swamp! A good example is lions. A lioness will not mate with a weakling and so males have to prove their dominance by seeing off competitors. If a male lion finds cubs that are the progeny of another male, he will kill them! It is the law of nature to ensure survival of the fittest, and the bloodline.

History hasn’t been kind to women who happen to poke their heads above the parapet. Lady Jane Grey lost her head through the ambitions of a manipulating bunch of men! After humiliating her by having her virginity checked, Joan of Arc was put to death because men of the cloth feared her power! Poor woman continued wearing her soldier’s uniform so the prison guards couldn’t rape her - they would have been paid well had they been successful! Remember the wives of Henry VIII? But here’s the thing, history isn’t only about the famous, it’s about every single one of us! The nearest thing to equality there has ever been is right now, and we’re still not very close.

It’s true that through history and today some women have done very well.  Curiously, I know some women who refuse point blank to work for another woman. This is where dominance and power comes into the equation. Power is a misused and often corrupt tool, but with salutations to the powerful women of the world, power most usually rests in the hands of men. Not just the big-wigs but across masculinity in general. Rape, violence, manipulation and bullying are all tools used to demonstrate power. And you don’t need to be very intelligent to use any or all of them. It’s not only women they target, but the idea is to infringe rights even by disallowing equality. Some cultures do this very well! Importantly, and take note, not all men are like that!

The Shangri-las sang about a teenager’s attraction to the leader of the pack, and Sandy’s dad, and her mother for that matter, wouldn’t have been too happy about her attraction to Danny (Grease). Those girls highlight another twist. Like it or not, it’s that old nature’s law for females to gravitate towards the alpha male, and humans display the same tendencies, often not ending well and sometimes with the jailbird scenario. In the natural world, females tend to be the providers and nurturers of the young. While alpha males tend to be big, brash, powerful and adept at what makes males tick.

The courts might call it corruption or stealing, but if you relate the same behaviour to a squirrel, he will rob acorns and chase off his competition to ensure the survival of its own bloodline, which is all that matters to him – friends don’t. Of course we superior beings make laws and societal rules that are supposed to curb such natural instincts, but we all know they are flaunted every day.

If there is an honest desire for humanity to evolve differently to the rest of nature, then we have to do better. It’s nice to think humanity has made progress and sure, we are a lot different to our cave-dwelling ancestors. I know there will be plenty of naysayers and disagreement with my treatise, but consider this. One of the most technological, well-educated and economy-driven societies on earth, on 20 January 2017 installed as their new president, a man who bears all the attributes of an alpha male.