MARY'S BIT or NO SIREN SONG FOR US
When Sir Thomas Browne mused back in the 1600s concerning what song the Sirens sang, he wasn't thinking of bursts of noise from an ambulance, police car, or fire engine, or wartime's WAHwahWAHwahWAH warning of advancing enemy bombers and the blessed continual wail of the all clear, or the poignant British summons bracketing the annual country-wide two minute silence remembering the war dead.
Then there's the alert for the imminent arrival of a tornado.
As it happens, the closest brush we ever had with a devil's spinning top was unheralded by a siren's song because we lived out of hearing of the nearest installation boasting such equipment, and even if we've been within range the power had been out for some time so a warning could not have been sounded. Thus we were alerted late one night when a neighbour who'd heard the announcement via her battery-driven radio rang up.
"Get into your basement immediately, a tornado is coming straight for us," she said quickly and hastily rang off.
We took her advice and, grabbing important items - the cat, my mug of coffee, a couple of torches, a candle in an old pierced tin lantern, and the box of important family papers - we moved downstairs to an inner room with no windows.
The cat, which had been acting strangely that evening as if it sensed its napping was going to be rudely disturbed, leapt out of my one-armed grasp as I descended and raced away to hide in the darkness under the stairs. We shut ourselves into the small room and set the lantern on top of a chest of drawers. I perched on an old chest next to an antique pot, swigging cold coffee and wondering if our computers would be damaged if the worst happened. The lantern threw sunflower-shaped shadows on the ceiling as shadows gamboled in the corners and the wind rose to a shriek, howling around the house. It roared with a shrill, high sound of rage, punctuated by dull thuds and crashes as the bin of recyclables fell over, loosing a multitude of tins to join garden chairs and the barbecue grill rolling round the garden or smacking into the side of the building.
It's been said in times of mortal stress we review our lives in the course of a few seconds. However, despite the imminent danger to life and limb, I did not find this to be so. Rather, a combination of excitement and apprehension produced an unreal sense of calm curiosity. I remember looking down at the decorative pot beside me and feeling sorry it would get smashed if touchdown happened to be in our footprint, and further hoping if disaster befell us the cat would not be killed.
It wasn't the first time I'd experienced this strange effect. The IRA were carrying out a letter-bombing campaign in London during the time I was passing through the immigration process. One winter evening I arrived at my underground station for the main line to catch a train home. I was on a tight schedule as it had already gone 5 PM and I had to be at my suburban doctor's office at 7 PM for the required medical, my commute taking one and a half hours. But the railway station was shut down because a suspicious parcel had been spotted and nobody was allowed up there until the package had been taken away by the bomb squad and defused if necessary.
A milling crowd of disgruntled travelers was therefore gathered underneath the main station and waiting with them I suddenly thought how terribly embarrassing it would be if there was an explosion, the roof came down on us, and the full specimen bottle in my handbag was broken, distributing its contents all over the place. At the time it simply never occurred me that possibility would be the least of my worries if the worst happened. In the event, the parcel was removed and normal commuter service resumed. I arrived at my appointment just in time, but the US Embassy would not accept my clean bill of health because, as it turned out, the medical had not been performed by one of their approved doctors. As for the strange package, I checked in the London paper over the next few days but saw nothing further about it.
Returning to the meteorological excitement unspooling some years later, there we were, sitting in the basement waiting to see how events played out. Suddenly an eerie hush fell, an unnatural silence more menacing than anything we'd heard all night. What those few seconds of dead calm meant I've never been able to establish, but the wind picked up again and departed in a dwindling, disappointed wail, grumbling away over the hill.
The rest of the night we took turns bailing out the well holding the basement pump until the power returned. Then we went out and started picking up tins.
AND FINALLY
Honore de Balzac was of the opinion that misfortune is the headiest wine, and since much of this newsletter seems to be devoted to disasters, we'll stay on theme and point out subscribers' next catastrophe may well fall on October l5th, when issue 59 of Orphan Scrivener flies out of the aether and into their in-box.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, lists of author freebies and mystery-related newsletters, Doom Cat (an interactive game written by Eric), and our growing pages of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also an Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/
