It's a short life - fill it
Written by Geoffrey Morris
ISBN: 978-1-901253-17-7
212 pages, paperback, 24 Black & White photographs, 45 Pen and Ink Drawings, 146mm x 208mm.
Special Offer Price: £ 5.99 Postage and Packing:
and illustrated by Patricia Kelsall
Published by Leonie Press, June 2000.
Geoffrey has lived his full life strictly according to the advice he received from his eccentric uncle who had made his fortune in Venezuela: "Cram in everything you can, boy. You've not long to fit it all in. It's not what you've done you'll regret, but all the things you've not done!"
Fate lent a hand too. For, like his engine-driver father (who drove the Coronation Scot), he was destined to be one of Nature's fall-guys, endlessly getting into scrapes and usually emerging bloody but unbowed.
The beautifully-written and witty book is in short-story length chapters, each illustrated with a sketch by Cheshire artist Patricia Kelsall. Naturally enough, it starts at his conception when his horrified and embarrassed mother was 52. She already had two sons and a daughter and the gap between Geoffrey and his nearest brother Harry was nine years. Harry welcomed the new sibling into his life as ballast for his go-kart as he raced along the 'backs' of Ruskin Road. At 78, Geoffrey still bears the scars of their frequent impacts with walls and grids.
At the age of five his lifelong wanderlust was well-established, especially his expeditions to the great iron footbridge near the loco sheds and engineering works in his native Crewe, which drew him like a magnet - especially when it had been newly-covered with tar. Everything he touched turned to farce, like accidentally buying an unexpurgated version of Shakespeare and innocently proclaiming the rude bits in class, constructing a home-made cannon in the field behind the Police Training College, and keeping a menagerie which included a duckling, pigeons, eels and crabs - all equally unpopular with the neighbours. With each amusing episode the author turns the clock back to a Crewe which will be familiar to everyone of his generation, a railway town surrounded by farmland where, as he says: "We organised our own pastimes, enjoyed ourselves immensely and harmed no-one very much." After qualifying as a teacher, Geoffrey volunteered to serve in tanks and was an incident-prone member of the 8th Army. During basic training he failed miserably to understand the broad hints of the women who threw themselves at him and his intake also had to make do with the wrong ammunition: hence the title of the book.
He was abroad for the whole war, on continuous active service, and was wounded three times. But he glosses over the serious parts and concentrates on the pratfalls, including storming a brothel in Athens, "liberating" rations from an American ship and getting stuck down a well in Corinth.
When it was over he married his boyhood sweetheart Joan, a fellow pupil at the Grammar School and by now also a teacher. She became a willing partner in his escapades but was always on hand to rescue him.
In civvie life, he was an unorthodox teacher and a delinquent parent, on one occasion taking his teenage son's renovated motor bike out for a test run, wearing a plastic pixie hood, balaclava and wellies, and falling off it on a village green in front of a gang of bikers.
Geoffrey Morris was born at Crewe, Cheshire, England in 1920 and attended
Crewe Grammar School before qualifying as a schoolmaster.
After volunteering to serve in the Royal Tank Regiment in the Second World War, he left Great Britain with the 50th R.T.R. to join the 8th Army in North Africa. He fought as tank crew from Alamein to Tunis, through Sicily, Italy, Palestine and Greece, was three times wounded and returned to England after four and a half years of absence. Three days later, by special licence, he married the girl who had waited for him. A school friendship from the age of 10 had developed into a love affair which is still going strong.
He taught at Derby, passing through all grades of staffing and retired thankfully in 1980 to settle in France, naturalize and become a French citizen.
Known for her beautifully detailed and realistic landscapes, buildings and flowers, Patricia Kelsall has turned her hand to light-hearted sketches to illustrate "Two Birds and No Stones".
"I drew the illustrations for 'Only Fools Drink Water' from the author's original photographs," said Patricia. "However 'Two Birds' has a different format and Anne Loader wanted to use a sketch at the head of each chapter. The chapters aren't numbered and it wasn't until afterwards that we realised I had actually done 45 drawings!
"I really enjoyed experimenting with the sketches, picking incidents out of each section and using Geoffrey's very descriptive writing to imagine what the scenes might have looked like. He was very inspirational. At first I was tempted to draw objects because that came more naturally but very soon the characters took over and people predominated. I tried to get as much life and movement into the pictures as I could."
"I had to do quite a lot of research. For instance, what would his pram have been like? How did he dress as a child and how did his pupils dress when he was a teacher? What did tank crew wear in the war and what weapons did they carry? What would his son's second-hand motorbike have looked like in the mid-60s? I studied lots of old photos to make sure I got the details right."
"My original thought was just to have a whimsical little sketch of something at the beginning of each chapter," said Anne. "But when Patricia showed me her first few drawings they worked so well that I didn't want to waste them by using them so small. When I sent copies to Geoffrey Morris, in France, he was amazed at the accuracy. He wrote back saying Patricia was a genius!"
