Extracts from Affection
Courtesy Fourth Estate
I’D BEEN searching the faces of passengers as they chattered past fearing twenty years might have changed him, and then there he was in front of me conjured from a flurry of parasols and hats and peering up at me like I was some damned specimen he’d misplaced. Of course, I’d have recognised him even if he wasn’t wearing the topee and waving a butterfly net in my face.
“Your eyes are worse, Row.”
“There has never been anything wrong with my eyes, Dr Turner.”
A woman pressing a large feathered hat to her head gave us a queer look as she hurried past with two bawling children.
I said, “Welcome to my asylum.”
“Drunkenness is a very great evil unquestionably, and it is very common in the North. Men, and even women, go recklessly on, drinking whatever comes in their way, and consequently suffer untold misery. How much happier and better off they would be if they kept sober and drank only West End Beer.”
Advertisement, The Northern Miner
Where the man ended and the swarm began became blurred. He held his arms out and the butterflies settled on them like a black cloak and he turned slowly and faced me, a strange bird. The insects had also perched beneath the brim of his pith helmet, obscuring his face, and the effect was like a mourning veil and a little grotesque. And then he flapped his arms and they rose in a cloud and began circling again, and he stepped away.
Rats! Rats! Rats! Rough on Rats,
Hang your dog and drown your cats;
We give a plan for every man
To clear his house with Rough on Rats.
From the Rough on Rats poison company, Jersey City, USA