THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX -- 15 DECEMBER 2020

Frigid weather or no, in a couple of weeks Eric will again serve as our first foot. Tradition demands the first set of pedal extremities over the threshold in the new year should be that of a dark-haired man, whose entry into a household brings with him good fortune for the coming twelve months. In northeastern England he usually carries a piece of coal and a silver coin to ensure enough of such necessaries during the year he brings in with him. Since he fitted the requirements of this important function, Mary's brother was always sent outside just before midnight on 31st December and only allowed back in after the year turned. This year many will doubtless view their first footers as not only ushering in the new year but also symbolically kicking out the terrible old one.

Meantime, as holiday preparations start cranking up subscribers may care to sit down for a while to give their shanks' ponies a rest and glance over this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener...

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MARY'S BIT or AH, THE DREAMS OF THE YOUNG!

A week or so back I toyed with the idea of dragooning The Silent Partner into co-forming the Maywrite Inkstained Wretches Concert Duo and Jug band, but he pleaded he cannot hit a note even when equipped with a large carpet beater. Though as he mentions below he played triangle along with his similarly equipped elementary classmates' performance of The Anvil Chorus. Where anyone could obtain that many triangles at the same time remains a mystery for the ages.

A bit of trivia: Elswick, my home area in Newcastle, forms the setting for our WWII Grace Baxter novel Ruined Stones and the living quarters in our fictional streets are based on the housing in which we lived when young. Indeed, the cramped cold tap scullery with sloping roof featured in Grace's lodgings is a mirror image of my older sister's when she was first married. However, none of those fictional homes were ever visited by the piano fairy, as happened when my younger sister came home from school one day to find said fairy had left her an upright second-hand joanna in our scullery.

For my younger sibling is a talented musician. She can play not only piano but also violin and indeed just about anything with strings, not to mention clarinet and recorder. She reads music, which I cannot. She is also a better singer. I just croak along for the ride. Well, OK, I did sing in the mass choir greeting the Queen Mother when she visited Tyneside, but when among a large group of organised singers or any similar crowd is concerned one voice among many is not usually individually distinguishable. And really mine is not quite as bad as that.

One day just for the heck of it said sister and I had a bash at recreating the Everly Brothers type of harmonies in the The Allisons' ancient hit Are You Sure? We never got past pinning down the first few lines of the chorus and just as well considering we agreed should we have landed a recording contract we were going to be called The Fyddling Four. With a y, yes. Ah, the dreams of the young! Of course there were only the two of us but ya gotta think big in this crazy biz, right?

Such musical skills as I possess extend to playing a mean kazoo. I have only performed on that curious instrument once in public and that was with a group of similarly equipped friends at an sf conference. One (not mine!) was played partly submerged in an almost empty beer mug which, if aural memory does not play me false, produced a strangely strangled buzzing sound that would have surprised the BBC Radiophonics Workshop. If any of us were to be reminded of it now, we would probably plead youthful exuberance as an excuse. Fortunately no recording of our impetuous and improvised concert exists. Another mystery for the ages is who arrived equipped with enough kazoos.

Not long after that I had a bash at learning to play the more complicated harmonica but only succeeded in producing sounds causing the cat to flee the room. However, I have been known to shake a mean (rather than green) tambourine, a skill bound to be useful were I ever to join the Salvation Army. Many subscribers will remember Mr Bean conducting a Salvation Army brass band in a Christmas episode of his titular programme. The organisation is and has been a continuing blessing to many, but my chief memory of them is when they would send one of their bands around Elswick to play on street corners on Sunday mornings at a time probably far too early for those whose last musical performance was harmonising the well-known chorus of Nelly Dean when the pub on the corner of our street emptied after chucking-out time was called the night before.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

...It's been said most domestic repairs can be accomplished by application of either WD40 or duct tape or, in advanced cases, both. Looks like we need to follow the former course as the BSP ticker is so still it's as if it's rusted up. Hopefully it'll be ticking again next time round...

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ERIC'S BIT or A NOTEWORTHY PROBLEM

Elsewhere in this issue Mary impugns my musical abilities. As much as I hate to quarrel in public, I must take issue with this. In point of fact I have absolutely no musical abilities to impugn. If one were to say that I was a bad singer that would be demonstrably false since I cannot sing at all, if singing is defined as emitting a string of notes.

The very concept of a "note" is alien to me. What are notes? Where do they come from? Not out of my mouth, that’s for sure. I’ve got plenty of mumbles in there, and grumbles, rumbles, squawks, and croaks. All sorts of unpleasant noises, but not a single note. No matter where I try to start a song it always ends up going too high or low. I’ve suffered a lifetime of public shame, lip-syncing the National Anthem and Happy Birthday and The Old Wooden Cross while everyone around me warbled and boomed in joyful tunefulness.

It is true, as Mary says, I did bang on a triangle during grade school music class. Did you know it is possible to play a triangle flat? My triangle sounded more like a polygon.

My musical ineptitude was not inherited. My dad was first trumpet in a Seabees band in Hawaii at the end of World War Two. When I was in fourth grade the shiny horn that had wafted Stardust out across the airways to troops in the pineapple fields was removed from its velvet-lined case and pressed into my sweaty little hands.

"Just remember," said my father by way of last minute instruction, "keep a stiff upper lip."

Apparently I would’ve been one step ahead of the game if I’d been born British. Sucking cherry cokes through straws at the corner drug store does not give you the musculature you need to tighten your lip into the brass equivalent of a vibrating reed. Maybe Mary, being from the UK, should take up trumpet.

The trumpet was not my instrument (any more than the triangle had been....) I managed to finger the valves. I could even operate the gadget that let the spit out of the tubes. Trouble was, I couldn’t get any into the tubes -- or air for that matter -- let alone force it clear out the other end.

I huffed and puffed to no avail. I might just as well have tried to blow the Eiffel Tower over from my back porch. There must have been ten miles of tubing between the mouthpiece and the bell -- stuffed full of concrete. My face turned blue, my cheeks puffed up until I was afraid they were going to split like overinflated footballs. The only sound I heard was bells as the room started to whirl around me and go dark due to my lack of oxygen. Once I did get some air through or maybe I only displaced a few of dad's breaths left over from 1944. It sounded like asthmatic geese coughing.

Eventually my parents let me quit. They were probably afraid I’d do myself a mischief.

That was my last crack at music, so there will be no Maywrite Inkstained Wretches Concert Duo and Jug band. Unless we perform 4'33" by John Cage, which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.

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AND FINALLY

Speaking of chucking-out time as we were, that for 2020 will be here in a couple of weeks so we'll close by reminding subscribers the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will be found lurking on their virtual doorsteps on 15th January.

Meantime everyone stay safe, and see you next year.
Mary R & Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://reedmayermysteries.000webhostapp.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. It also hosts the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Our joint blog, largely devoted to reviews of Golden Age of Mystery fiction, lurks about at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

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