TOPPING THE LADDER OF LIFE.

Part two. I wonder if you spot any similarities with a political charlatan education at Eton rather than a secondary modern?

TOPPING THE LADDER OF LIFE.

Konstantin Ivan Kerfuffle Jackson: Part two.

Mr Jenkins had a lot to say about a damaged bus window even though he was less concerned about Tom Parker Esquire and his sorely damaged shoulder. But it was the latter that ended up in the local magistrate’s court.

Now you and I all know that the smashed window and the painful attempted massacre of Tom Parker Esquire’s shoulder had nothing to do with Ivan, but it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to it explain away.

He’d seen something through the corner of one eye as he drove towards Swanspottle and it had, when he tried to focus his memory, looked very much like a witch on her broomstick, but there was no way he was going to make that sound even remotely plausible, because Griselda Entwhistle kept her activities a secret that even her neighbours didn’t know, so he ended up with a quite different explanation.

“We all know there are occasional meteorite strikes,” he said, “you know, pieces of rubble hurtling through space at terrifying speeds that sometimes break through the earth’s atmosphere…”

“Of course we do,” muttered the magistrate, and he had a telescope in his bedroom as evidence of his fascination with extra terrestrial bodies. “And you believe it was one of those?” he asked.

“Well, sir,” (that term of address went down well) “I only caught it for a fractured moment in the corner of one eye and I have no idea anyway what a meteorite might look like the instant it strikes something, but it’s the only explanation I can think of.”

The council for the Esquire broke in (much to the magistrate’s annoyance), “But the man Mr Jackson was actually driving, so he must be responsible!”

The magistrate was having nothing of that and decided that Tom Parker Esquire had been struck by an act of God and was damned lucky to still be alive and ought to be grateful to the driver for getting him swiftly to hospital, and dismissed the case.

The story made the Brumpton Times (a highly reputable local paper) and a surge of interest, including the photograph of Konstantin Ivan Kerfuffle Jackson was printed in colour, large on its front page together with the word HERO in red capitals.

Which gave Mr Jenkins who, if you recall, was in charge of personnel at the bus company, a headache.

Ivan Jackson, with or without his other names, was being recognised and even the bus he was driving was occasionally being avoided in case something about him attracted passing meteorites.

So he scratched his head and, as chance would have it, Mr Swanage, Inspector of Buses, was retiring, so there was a vacancy not so much in the public eye, for our Ivan to fill.

His dream, his lifelong ambition, was at last being realised!

And in his new role he had freedoms. He could stand at bus stops waiting to check on passing buses, examining their driver’s documents, counting his passengers, checking on ticket sales with any conductors that remained as slowly one-man operated buses were being brought in. That dates it.

And he discovered that once or twice he found some of the female passengers attractive enough to want to touch. He knew the type. His own mother, after all, had lived a life swarming with eager young men needing sexual comfort, and he was still young enough to be called a youngish man.

So he touched one, on the thigh, making it seem like an accident, and she frowned at him and he shook his head and apologised, and she recognised him from the newspaper photograph of him and touch him back, on the thigh and, naughtily, elsewhere.

It became a sort of dance, and within a matter of months she agreed to marry him, and did.

But that didn’t stop him from succumbing to temptation and touching the odd female back-side, and, once and purely accidentally, a male one which went either unnoticed or explained away as truly accidental. Always gently and always seemingly unintentionally, and he did it once too often and Mrs Florence Demanby objected in a loud voice.

“I’m so sorry,” he said meekly, “it was the wind.”

“Tosh!” she replied, “There is no wind, and in my opinion you ought to be behind bars! You did that to me last week, and the week before!”

“I can’t have,” he stammered, “I wouldn’t… I mean, it was an accident.”

“I’m reporting you to your superiors,” she assured him.

And she did, and Mr Jenkins, scowling, called him into his office at the end of that very shift.

“I’ve had complaints,” he said severely, “women of a certain kind tell me that you make sexual advances at the bus stop!”

“What certain kind?” he asked.

“Blondes, with chests and legs you’d die for,” growled Mr Jenkins, “and one of them said she’d see you behind bars for doing it if it happened again!”

So after that, and with a warning on his record, he dropped his attention on lightly touching pretty blondes and moved on to brunettes whist all the time being married to a blonde. But his lovely wife, and she was lovely, and kind, and honest, and pregnant possibly by him, though a certain Mr Green might rightly lay claim, stuck by him until rumours grew big enough to reach her, and she demanded a divorce.

By then he was deeply enamoured of a nurse who travelled daily on a bus that he inspected equally daily, a Miss Babs Inchwick, and she began flirting back to him until the intimacy of her contacts to him was considerably more personal that his contacts by him to her, and she proposed to him, and he agreed to marry her, which he did. A second wife in such a short order! And he gaining a reputation for philandering!

It was shortly after then that Mr Jenkins passed away at his desk whilst attending to some government paperwork of a troubling and complex nature, and there was a vacancy in his chair, one that Ivan was invited to fill.

He’d not only fulfilled his ambition to become a bus inspector, but reached a higher status. He was in a chair in an office and could inspect inspectors if he wished, and he did wish.

From then on it might have been up or down for Ivan Jackson. He felt he was at the top of the tree (above him were only the royalty of bus companies, those who answered to nobody and who never touched a bus but drove around in large motorcars).

A proven liar, and known philanderer, which way would he go?

Fortunately his education had been sufficient to teach him one lesson.

If you reach or exceed your goal, be careful, be straight with people and for goodness sake don’t deceive them. Because if you do that eventually you will tumble to the gutter, and that wouldn't be at all pleasant.

© Peter Rogerson, 2.7.22

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