Anton's Ideas

<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/local-flavor/”>Local Flavor</a>

on ‘word prompt’ about where I came from.

WHENCE I CAME

My father and mother were fourteen thousand miles apart, give or take the odd furlong, when they first heard about each other. He was eight years younger and she was reputed to be looking for a third husband, preferably a toy boy, and was impatient that she should captivate someone suitable before the war broke out, as all expected. This was in September 1938. She happened to be lounging by the pool of her Thames side mansion in Buckinghamshire opposite Windsor, give or take the odd furlong.

She was very attractive, one of the highest paid female entertainers in Britain, and her colleagues and cronies, one did not have friends in the theatre and film world in England in those days, all placed bets on which current up and coming matinee idol  would suit her taste. She was reading the back page of an Australian newspaper, which a fellow thespian had dropped in her lap out of spite, and she was intrigued by the photograph of a young dentist who had recently qualified to practise his science, and even won a scholarship to go to England and  start his career there. She drew a red circle round his name and dropped the paper on the outdoor coffee table  where she envisaged alleviating her boredom later that evening.

By chance that same day a young, newly qualified dentist, in Brisbane, Australia, happened to see an advertisement for a new film about to take Australia by storm, or tornado or whatever things take Australia by, and was overcome at once by an attack of paroxsyzmal atrial fibrulation  which continued throughout the voyage to England, six weeks on a boat via the Suez Canal.

As happy fate would have it he was walking down Piccadilly shortly after his arrival in London, one never walks up  this thoroughfare though for the life of me I have no idea why not, when who should he bump into but the film star of his dreams.

“You!” She heart throbbed at him,  –  you know like mad; really hammed it up.

“You,”he replied, for Australians are a race of few words and soon, he hoped, to be of fewer teeth.

Well a week later before the glitter of Fleet Street cameramen and columnists they were wed amid unalloyed joy and the whole of the west End was in raptures. Thirteen months later they had a daughter, an absolute cherub who was just a weeny bit too young to star in a war picture, but fifteen months after that they had a son. He was a child of immense charisma and obvious talent, even at that age, so I am told. And who am I to dispute this tribute for that little boy was I.

THE END

Anton Wills-Eve