COMPETITION

Alphabetical dozen

Charles Seaton

In Competition No. 1489 you were in- vited to include the following words, in any order, in a plausible piece of prose: apha- sia, buff, crackerjack, dubbing, echt, floozie, greenly, heyday, irreducible, jim- jams, knob, leastways.

By now many of you are so adept at this particular task that the slightest flaw can be enough to put you among the also rans. So, please, no uncalled-for plurals (knobs), no adverbs as adjectives (greenly) and no dodging the issue with proper names (Lady Aphasia Greenly and Herr von Echt), Of the dozen given words greenly and echt were the hardest to fit in snugly and even when correctly used they still tended to look a little out of place. Among the less predictable themes were new versions of the Lady Godiva story (from Neil K. Henderson) and what the bishop didn't say to the actress (from John Boak) while Andrew Corrigan and C. R. Smith even contrived to dilate on the Spectator cross- word. I. C. Snell on Saturday telly, Philip A. Nicholson's account of a bit of mayhem and Nicholas Hodgson's cameo of Uncle Cedric were close runners-up to ' the prizewinners printed below, who receive a well-earned £15 each.

I always get the jimjams in the presence of death but I turned the knob slowly and crept in The hooded lamp shone greenly on the body. There he lay, in the buff, irreducible layers of fat contouring his abdomen, poor old chap, stricken with aphasia and thrombosis at the last; least- ways, that's what the doctor called it. Hard to imagine him in his heyday now; the star whose countless admirers were never tired of dubbing him 'the maestro' and suchlike, and sounding off about each of his crackerjack performances. I remember how he would swagger on to the stage with a floozie on either arm and a cigar in his mouth, the perfect, edit archetypal variety

artiste. (0. Smith)

'Echt!' said Arthur.

'Come again?' I replied. Arthur's diction was easily mistaken for mild aphasia.

'Echt!' he said. 'Kosher! Pukka! The real thing!' And he unwrapped his parcel to reveal a painting of a youngish woman. 'Look at that. What a crackerjack? Italian, I'd say. Five hun- dred nicker to you, squire. Absolutely

ble.'

'I didn't know you, were an art buff, Arthur. Where did you get it?' I asked greenly.

Arthur smiled inscrutably. In his heyday he could supply anything from a bed knob to a bassinet. The dealers loved him, dubbing him Abanazar. But this was different. We gazed at it together. 'Good looker, leastways,' said Arthur. 'Bit of a floozie, though, if you ask me.'

I was beginning to get the jimjams. 'You realise what you've knocked off? It's only the Mona Lisa.'

Arthur bridled. 'We usually call her La Gioconda,' he said, 'in the trade.'

(Noel Petty)

Uncle Simon was echt Edwardian. Leastways, such is the family legend. With his trim Imperial beard, the silver knob to his cane, and his dove-grey spats, he must have cut quite a figure in his heyday.

When I first met him, he was in his late fifties. Imperturbable and adaptable, he had pared life to an irreducible simplicity. However hard the times, no sinister buff envelope gave him the jimjams; it was consigned unopened to the waste-paper basket.

The old crackerjack was equally unaffected by prosperity, a kindly urbanity making him master of any situation. The only time I saw him near aphasia was when he overheard someone dub- bing his favourite niece 'a floozie'. I met him once in old age. Arthritic now, but still handsome, he was sitting in his conservatory with the light filtering greenly through the dusty glass. I remember he gave me some wonderful

brandy. (Rodney Burke)

The film, an echt Truffaut from his Parisian heyday, ran for a fifth time. In the dubbing room, David again watched the crucial sequ- ence, coordinating the action with the electronic numbers greenly flickering on his display panel. Once again the seductive floozie, played by Cecile Dubuffere, an absolute crackerjack, rose from the four-poster and swayed across the boudoir. Her breasts swung. Her lips moved silently. Then as those of her co-star parted in reply and David's cue came, an attack of the jimjams unnerved him and the old dreaded aphasia took over. Not a word emerged.

The sound engineer touched a knob and the electronic digits went into reverse, likewise the action.

'David,' said the director, 'we've squeezed the dialogue to an irreducible minimum; leastways, we've tried to. When Alain opens his mouth (number one-one-five), you say "Darling".

That's all. Okay?' David nodded. 'Take Six,' said the director. Dry-mouthed and abject in misery, David watched as his dream woman crossed the bedroom floor, completely in the

buff. (Gerard Benson) inspections in his heyday by Sergeant Twomey — an echt bastard, as Fritz the POW latrine orderly put it — produced an irreducible mini- mum of panic even in the staunchest.

One had to buff boots shiny with dubbing. That was normal enough. But in addition each of us in turn was detailed to clean the copper knob on the barrack door — a knob which glowed greenly with corrosion however hard one polished — until, in the Sergeant's words, it was 'crackerjack'.

No penalty officially attached to failure in this matter of the knob. 'Leastways', admitted Sergeant Twomey, 'not in King's Regulations'. However, unless one gave satisfaction, leave was stopped. Sergeant Twomey considered this beneficial, maintaining leave to consist of no- thing but 'floozie' (fornication) and 'jimjams' (DTs from excessive drinking). Expostulation being useless, we perforce maintained silence, as though aphasia were rife. (Charles Mosley)