Omeros
“One pod was the Somme’s.
It burst with his father’s lungs. Then a pale yellow asterisk for a great-uncle marked Bloemfontein.
At the War Office he’d paid some waxworks fellow to draw flowers for battles, buds for a campaign.
The cold-handed bugger’d done it for a fortune.
Undertaker’s collar, bald as a snooker-ball, as hunched as a raven, he plucked titles in turn from their cliffs of gilt ledgers, picking with his bill from Agincourt to Zouave, returning to where he found blue blood in the Plu...nketts. The Major voiced no objection. But why Scots? Why a claymore with a draped tartan? And, when the willow faded into a dubious cloud, he smiled. To pay more, naturally, and he did. A carved, scrolled shield waited at the willow’s base, his name and hyphen for a closing date, then a space for son and heir.
“No heir,” he told the mummy from Madame Tussaud, who believed he had dropped an aitch. “I mean ‘No. Here,’”
snapped the Major, pointing to where the blank place showed on the waiting shield.MoreLess
It burst with his father’s lungs. Then a pale yellow asterisk for a great-uncle marked Bloemfontein.
At the War Office he’d paid some waxworks fellow to draw flowers for battles, buds for a campaign.
The cold-handed bugger’d done it for a fortune.
Undertaker’s collar, bald as a snooker-ball, as hunched as a raven, he plucked titles in turn from their cliffs of gilt ledgers, picking with his bill from Agincourt to Zouave, returning to where he found blue blood in the Plu...nketts. The Major voiced no objection. But why Scots? Why a claymore with a draped tartan? And, when the willow faded into a dubious cloud, he smiled. To pay more, naturally, and he did. A carved, scrolled shield waited at the willow’s base, his name and hyphen for a closing date, then a space for son and heir.
“No heir,” he told the mummy from Madame Tussaud, who believed he had dropped an aitch. “I mean ‘No. Here,’”
snapped the Major, pointing to where the blank place showed on the waiting shield.MoreLess
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