Poop Deck Shanty

‘Daddy’s set fire to himself and has to go away.’
This was how my paternal grandfather’s (Leonard Sexbeach Blancmange,you may well have heard of him) departure had been announced to his sons. His daughter was too young to grasp the detail.
The First Pair of Hands to Advertise Washing Up Liquid on Television (my grandmother’s proud boast) gestured expansively into a resigned shrug. And that was that.

My great grandmother, on my mother’s father’s side, was immensely proud of her small feet. She used to hide in the cupboard and pray in a language she made up, when she wasn’t smuggling fresh produce over the German/Austro-Hungarian border. Her husband was a celebrated gambler, swearer and less well-known plumber. He tried to kill himself in 1927 but only succeeded in shooting himself in the back (not easy) in one of Berlin’s municipal parks.

Actually Leonard had fallen asleep with a cigarette whilst waiting for his wife to come home from the affair she was having with an out of work actor called Wallis Bramhall Leviathan. You might have missed him in the Errol Flynn Adventures of Robin Hood, every Christmas half my family would stare and point:
‘There he is.’
‘Is that him ?’
‘I think so.’
There he was, third tree on the left or somesuch, I have never been able to identify him.
He became my father’s stepfather and as for L.S.B., well no one I know ever saw him again. My father and his siblings were never curious. It transpired he expired, a furious alcoholic, in a small village in Wales in 1993, I never found out the details as I was no longer on speaking terms with his son, my own father, who did not find out the fate of his father until 2007, by then Norris Spoonpudding Blancmange, was quite literally living illegally on (if not in) his own shit. With impeccable foresight he had sold his house to pay off his second wife and with the meagre remains he had realised romantic notions of a nautical existence. This was interrupted by a brief residence at the local camping site before he ‘climbed aboard’ the Manati* of Wry. The illegality and the excrement derived from his unwillingness to regularly empty the septic tank on board, instead plumping for dumping his untreated load straight into the river where it accumulated upon the sandbank on which the pride of the waves was firmly lodged, ensconsced like a gravid hippo in it’s own faecal tar.
Something of a regular supplicant at the altar of Bacchus himself, it is only a matter of time before he stumbles on the gangplank and plunges headfirst into a thick brown mess of his own devising. I hope, gentle reader you will join me in wishing him a bon voyage.

* Manati from the Taino (pre-Columbian people from the Caribbean) word for ‘tit’