15. Brother Bumptious

THROUGH THE GATES OF TIME - Part 15

It’s not just flesh and blood that can (and does) evolve over time, it’s the language the owners of that flesh and blood use to communicate with that evolves too.

May had vanished into the kitchen, flustered and quite cross because a strange and (let’s be honest) somewhat smelly small monk in his habit and sporting a decaying tonsure had found his way into their home via a portal she neither understood nor wanted to go anywhere near again. It was Christmas day and convention suggested that she as the woman of the household should attend to cooking a substantial meal while the others watched television and Roger enjoyed a sherry or two.

For once, though, she was only too happy to leave the monk to Roger and the kids to sort out.

Roger, though, was uncertain as to what to do. He could open the closet door and push the sad little monk out and forget about him, and knew that pushing him out into goodness-knows where would be easy but forgetting him would be impossible. And along with impossible would arrive the guilty feeling, the knowledge that one possible outcome could be that poor (and odorous) little monk would find himself suffering a horrible death at the hands of some miscreant lurking in the shallows or depths of time.

“Who is he, dad?” asked Frodo, a question which reminded Roger that he had no idea who the man was.

“I’ve not idea,” he replied, airily, searching his brain for a logical answer that wasn’t quite so negative.

“He’s a monk,” Apple told him, intensely and quite knowledgeably, “We’ve done them at school. There used to be loads of them. Friar Tuck was one, and he lived with Robin Hood who was an outlaw who lived in Sherwood Forest. Teacher said they did loads of good deeds, like chanting prayers and so on.”

It was about at this point that Roger was reminded of the evolution of tongues as he pointed at himself and quite studiously enunciated “Roger” to the little monk whilst nodding his head as if head nodding would help comprehension.

The monk seemed to take ages to think. Maybe, thought Roger, his mental processes had been slowed to standstill by the chanting of too many prayers in a long litany of musical monotony. Then he smiled as if he’d made up his mind, a smile that demonstrated the possible source of the aroma he carried with him as he showed that most of his teeth were little more than blackened stumps.

“Bumptious,” he said in an accent that reminded Roger of holidays in Cornwall.

“Pardon?” asked Roger.

“Bumptious. Brother Bumptious,” replied the monk, the brother part of his reply being almost exactly the same as it would be if spoken by a twenty-first century Cornish monk with bad teeth and the beginnings of a lisp.

“Brother Bumptious?” asked Roger, and Apple giggled.

The little monk nodded happily, and pointed at Roger and said “Roger”.

“That’s some kind of communication established,” sighed Roger, “he apparently speaks an ancient version of English, but it’s doubtful whether we’ll understand much of what he says.”

That proved to be more true than even he suspected when the little Brother Bumptious came out with a sentence so long it might have been a paragraph, but there was barely a syllable that made any sense to Roger.

He was saved by May poking her head in and asking which of the kids wanted to help her with the sprouts, a request which fell on deaf ears because Apple was hissing to Frodo that he’d best keep well clear of their visitor or he might end up smelling just as bad, and he’d end up being called names at school like the smelly kid in her class.

“His name’s Brother Bumptious,” Roger told his wife, “he said that quite clearly, but I have an idea that words have undergone a mighty change since whenever he lived because I can’t understand anything else that he said, though in an odd sort of way it had what you might call an English sound to it.”

“The sprouts?” asked May, and when it was clear that nobody was interested she returned to the kitchen muttering that she didn’t know why she bothered because nobody liked them, anyway.

Roger was lost for anything to say that the little monk might understand when he was rescued to Frodo.

“We need to put the telly on, dad,” he said.

Under normal circumstances Roger would have queried the use of the word need, but circumstances were far from normal and he let his natural antipathy to the misuse of vocabulary go unchallenged by switching the television on.

At the back of his mind he had a fear that Brother Bumptious might be so alarmed by a moving picture springing to life in close proximity to where he was standing that something alarming might happen, like him falling down to the floor and gnashing what remained of his teeth.

But it was Christmas day and still morning despite the weird events that had occurred since the disappearance of their stone-age guests, and the television broadcasters were being obsessed by an impossible and rather pompously harangued belief by a clergyman in his pulpit that a woman had conceived a child without any input from the male of the species, a piece of trivia that he had long looked on as proof, if proof were needed, that the superstitions that had evolved in the iron age really ought to have stayed there.

Then, almost immediately, the clergyman came to the end of his speech and the picture faded and reappeared as a line of chanting monks holding lit candles that might have flickered, but they were clearly battery-powered and didn’t. With all solemnity they moved along, making their slow way down the central aisle of what was probably a cathedral, and out through a door at the far end.

Maybe it was the image, or maybe the song or chant that was being enunciated in a predominately rich baritone, but Brother Bumptious became most excited and did what many a family owned pet cat or dog might have done, and scurried to see round the back of the television and maybe have a conversation with the monks.

He might have been a small monk, but he was too big to fit in the small space between the television and the wall, and he knocked the instrument over.

“He’s broken it!” shouted Frodo, “he’s only gone and knocked it over, and it’s probably bust!”

Roger, meanwhile, did his best to grab hold of Brother Bumptious, but when he grabbed hold of his coarsely woven and probably rather ancient black habit, it tore and he came away with a handful of the material from which it was made.

It was a matter of good fortune, but the television set wasn’t broken, and once the monk had been moved away from where he thought the line of chanting monks might have gone, it was set back safely on its stand and Roger frowned at Brother Bumptious, and shook his head.

“Now that was a stupid thing to do,” he said gravely, “you might have been electrocuted. It’s only a picture and you can’t interact with ir.”

But Brother Bumptious had no idea of moving pictures or images that appeared on a black surface from nowhere, he knew nothing about interaction with anything man made, and consequently he burst into tears.

© Peter Rogerson, 05.12.20