4. CUDDLY TED'S OUTING

Tragedy is in the air, but Wallace is too young to understand

Cuddly Ted was a sadly misnamed toy because he wasn’t a Teddy Bear at all, but a grey knitted elephant that someone had stuffed with old socks when it had been made around the time Wallace Pratchett had been conceived.

It had been Wallace who christened the toy Cuddly Ted, and Cuddly Ted he remained for as long as Wallace loved him. Beyond that, who can tell? For Cuddly Ted didn’t last so long in Wallace’s loving and most tender care. Cuddly Ted got lost.

It was a balmy October day and by the time it dawned Wallace was almost three. He was dressed in his coat, a hand-me-down from Maureen’s mother because, as she explained, it was much too small for Maureen and she most definitely wasn’t going to have nay more children because she never wanted to do anything close-up and personal with another man. Her one and only true love was gone and her love-life was over.

The Second World War had been ended for over a year though you wouldn’t have known it had you been a visitor from another planet sent to inspect the way humanity was treating its beautiful world: there were piles of masonry, sad remnants of bombing expeditions from Germany, here and just about everywhere where homes were missing, looking very much like extracted teeth from a row of grubby incisors, and to make matters worse, food was still on ration.

Wallace had been tucked into his push-chair by his mother who planned to take a leisurely walk into town with Auntie Amy, her sister. She had something very important to discuss and she didn’t want the Reverend Jack, her loving but increasingly ill-tempered husband, to know what was on her mind.

Wallace liked being in that push-chair. When he was sitting in it he was facing his mother and could see what she was feeling like from the expression on her face, could smile back at her smiles, and see the world they had covered behind her as he was being pushed along.

He was clutching Cuddly Ted as they set off. He knew where they were going because they’d been that way many times before. They passed the old Gothic church where daddy made his, to Wallace, meaningless pronouncements and where people sang what were, also to Wallace, rather dreary hymns. Then it was a short walk to the High Street and a few shops.

Usually mummy talked to him, even if she was with Aunty Amy. Maureen, his big cousin, wasn’t there because she was at school. He preferred it when she wasn’t at school because she always found plenty of time to play with him, though sometimes she was stopped by his father, who seemed to think there was something terribly wrong with a girl always playing with a little boy, though he never said why.

This time, though, mummy was talking to Auntie Amy and she was terribly serious. He could tell that much because, although what she was saying was little more than background noise to him, it seemed to have a strange and almost frightening intensity for both women, and he could detect sadness in the air.

“The doctor told me,” Helen was saying, “he wondered if Jack would like to be told the bad news.”

“Is it really bad?” asked Amy, alarmed.

“He used the word terminal,” murmured Helen. “Apparently it has to do with his cigarettes.”

“I thought they were good for a man’s chest,” said a surprised Amy, “just about everyone smokes cigarettes. It gives a man a nice friendly sort of rumble to his voice.”

“And it sometimes leads to medical issues,” sighed Helen. “He’s stopped smoking, and that’s made him bad tempered.”

“I’ve heard it can do that,” nodded Amy.

“Apparently the cigarettes have caused him to have an abscess on his lung,” shuddered Helen, “and the doctor said it’s too far gone for anything to be done about it. They might operate, but the Bishop won’t pay for it. He believes that life and death are in God’s hands! I’ll bet he’d find the money if it was him who was dying, though!”

All this was meaningless to Wallace. The words were too strange and so he cuddled Cuddly Ted and kissed his trunk, something that usually caused mummy to burst into peals of laughter.

But this time she took no notice, so he decided to draw her attention to it.

“Look, mummy!” he called, pushing the elephant’s knitted trunk into his mouth and chewing on it.

“Not now, darling,” she said without so much as glancing his way.

That upset the little boy. Not much can upset an almost three year-old, but being ignored when he’s chewing the knitted trunk of his favourite toy did.

In his head he called mummy and Auntie Amy names for treating him with so much ignorance, and he decided to do something about it. He decided to punish them good and proper.

So Cuddly Ted and his rather moist trunk was cast, by him, over the side of his push chair. He watched it as it landed on the hard pavement, and he yelped out that Cuddly Ted was gone.

They must have heard him, but they ignored him.

“He might last until next summer, but that’s the best we can hope for,” explained Helen.

“And if they operate?”

“I don’t know. The doctor says it’s probably too far gone for the operation to give Jack little more than too much pain.”

“Mummy! Cuddly Ted’s gone! He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone!” shrieked little Wallace.

“Just be quiet, darling,” said mummy, almost severely, “mummy’s talking to Auntie Amy.”

Wallace watched in horror as a big boy on his way home from school for his dinner saw Cuddly Ted and kicked him! Yes, the big bully of a boy kicked Cuddly Ted into the pavement’s edge, where some shrubs marked the border of a row of terraced house and their tiny front gardens.

“Mummy!” he shrieked, “the boy kicked Cuddly Ted! He hurt Cuddly Ted!”

“Just be quiet, Wallace!” commanded mummy with uncharacteristic ferocity, and when he looked up at her face he could see that she was crying.

Why was she crying? Mummy hardly ever cried…

“Mummy, Cuddly Ted!” he shrieked. But too late. He could still see Cuddly Ted with his trunk among the sad looking autumnal shrubs at the edge of the pavement as mummy pushed the wheelchair round a corner, and his precious toy disappeared from sight.

Then, horror struck, he saw the worst possible thing.

A little girl in a pretty cotton dress and with pigtails came into sight round that same bend and ran across the road to her mother, who was waiting there.

“Mummy, mummy, mummy, look what I’ve found!” shouted the child, holding Cuddly Ted out in front of her and smiling happily.

And Wallace could just about hear her mother’s reply, “that’s nice, darling, we’ll take him home and give him a good bath because he’s not very clean, is he?”

“I’m going to lose him, Amy,” Helen was sobbing, “and you know what that means, don’t you? The Vicarage goes with his job...”

“Cuddly Ted’s gone!” shrieked Wallace.

“That’s nice, darling,” wept his mother.

©Peter Rogerson 30.05.19