3. Mr Squeaky Voice

STEPPING BACK IN TIME Part 3

Had the supposedly five year old Owongo (and let me be candid here, he was an extremely distant ancestor of mine, so it stands to reason he was of huge intelligence), but had he known it, the day after the day of his near drowning in the river (which was little more than a stream) was his sixth birthday.

But he didn’t know. He had no treason to suspect there was any such thing as any sort of birthday in his time-line. He had no idea what a birthday might be, and neither did his parents (Faceache, aged nineteen and Mingey, aged seventeen) because they lived in an age of almost embarrassing ignorance.

Let me digress for a moment and go back a little more than six years. Faceache was thirteen and Mingey was eleven and they had been left to their own devices because they were kids and their parents were busy, though what so preoccupied both sets of parents has been lost to time. And it was during that period of play that they discovered a game that was so wonderful that over the next few days of parental absence they played if far too often, and nine months later (not that months had been invented, that was a joy that was to be described by cleverer folk than them in the distant future), but nine months later Owongo popped into the world and nobody was at all surprised.

Nobody had as yet associated a game on wet winter afternoons with babies popping out of anywhere the best part of a year later, which was a shame. But it had happened and after a great deal of squawking and demanding the breast Owongo emerged as a thoroughly likeable little boy (I did mention that he was an ancestor of mine, didn’t I)

All this is a long-winded way of me trying to explain why Owongo had no idea that it was his birthday, and his actual birth had been forgotten by him as well. Ignorance was everywhere.

But in primeval times like then, five year old boys suddenly discovered that they feel different. These days they’re told it’s because they’re six and no longer babies or toddlers or anything infantile like that. I suppose it’s the same with girls, so ladies, don’t feel left out, please. Back in what we look on (if we read the most boring pre-history books) as Cro Magnon times a great deal of what we today take for granted had to be discovered and Owongo’s sudden surge into manliness at the age of six will have been put down to either the work of fairies or a stubborn piece of nastiness in his character that could be thrashed out of him.

Owongo was aware that his body and his brain had undergone a meteoric change, and in order to avoid the thrashing that was possibly on its way he decided to go wandering into the woodlands that bordered their riverside community.

And it was during that extraordinary journey of exploration that he met a grown man with a squeaky voice. He knew that the man’s voice was squeaky because he was weeping and gnashing his equally squeaky teeth and begging for help. The fact that he was in pain was obvious even to a six year olf because he was surrounded by a buzzing cloud of hornets.

A note, for the moment, about the livestock of an age nobody alive today has ever seen on account of its huge distance (in time) away from us. There were many of the flora and fauna we recognise today, but some were plain nasty. If size was the problem they were bigger and if anger was what upset them, they were angrier. And these hornets were both, and they were stinging Mr Squeaky Voice in the kind of way that would inevitably see his total and complete demise.

Now we have to search back in our memories to chapter one when Owongo was given a pulpy sweet fruit for the first (and last) time in his life and the fact that it had been swarming with hornets as well as that it caused a huge outpouring of vomit from his then five year old gastric system. The memory of it made him shudder and blink back tears of memory, but this is Owongo we’re talking about and besides reacting in a totally human way he noticed a tree nearby laden with what looked like exactly the same fruit. And, being Owongo, he had a sudden burst of brilliance that many a toffee-nosed so-called expert living today might suggest was impossible for a six year old Cro Magnon boy.

“Me help!” he shouted at Mr Squeaky Voice, and he grabbed hold of a huge squelchy mango type fruit and beat it to a pulp until it looked exactly like the mush his loving father had forced down hi throat.

Now, a word about the kind of hornets that flew around Owongo’s neck of the woods thirty-five or so thousand years ago. They were big, they were vicious and they had sweet teeth (if they had teeth at all, that is) and as one they zoomed with a horrible insecty roar to Owongo’s mashed up sweet smelling fruit and covered it with a layer of howling hornet.

“Now come!” shouted our six year old chirpy little boy now old enough to rescue strangers, and he grabbed Mr Squeaky voice by one hand and dragged him away. Owongo, as you can tell, was remarkably powerful for his age.

The squeaky stranger had no choice. He had been stung too many times for anything other than the stings to register in his mind, and he trotted along with Owongo until they came to the stream that ran through the river valley where Owongo lived.

“Now jump!” urged Owongo, and so show the stranger what he meant he leapt into the barely gurgling waters himself.

Mr Squeaky voice could see the sense and he smiled at Owongo. “Me come!” he squeaked, not that Owongo understood him because he was speaking Neanderthal whilst Owongo’s language was a northern variety of Cro Magnon, the sort that had long drawn out vowels and a warm, loving intonation.

“What my boy doing now he six?” shouted Faceache, who had no idea how old his son might be, but wanted to sound clever.

“He save me!” squeaked Mr Squeaky Voice, “brave boy saved me from a plague of hornets!” Of course nobody understood a word of what he said, but there’s something warm about gratitude, and they understood because of it.

“What you need is a nice cup of tea,” shouted Mingey from her cave entrance.

Of course, she didn’t mean tea as we understand it. Or cup. Or even need, but the invitation was plain to Mr Squeaky Voice once he had rid his flaming flesh of the last surviving hornets.

And now we come to the spooky bit.

The stranger with an odd voice stayed with them in their cosy cave for several nights (he needed to in order to recover) before he returned to his own people, and after a period we with our advanced understanding of clocks and calendars might call nine months Owongo found himself enjoying the company of a brand new sister they were bound to call Pretty.

Mingey didn’t suggest anything and her face bore a simple innocence, and Faceache never asked, but there was something a wee bit Neanderthal about Pretty.

Owongo noticed, but rather liked it.

© Peter Rogerson 13.02.22