“That’s the way to do it!” The voice was a cross between squeaks and articulate sneezes. Indeed, this puppet of Punch was an actual cross - as were the puppets of Judy, the clacking crocodile, Toby the Dog.... crude wooden crosses upon which the distinguishing gloves of character were hung - being poked up and down within the upright canvas coffin proscenium... whilst the audience could often spot the human hands that held up such puppets: hands belonging to the voice who spoke in various versatilities of tone.

Tilted from side to side. Jabbed to and fro. Brandished at the kids in the front row. Even catapulted into the audience upon an act of dying. And when the Judy cross, along with her sausage-sizzling pan, had been brutally mauled by a crocodile at the behest of her husband Punch, she was cartwheeled upon the air straight into the tiny hands of Tim who sat in the middle curve of wooden chairs. But he was alarmed to discover that Judy’s string of sausages was as real as it was possible to be, tiny sacs of blubber with twists of their own skin between: in contrast to the scarcely believable form of Judy herself - two thin pieces of stripped lumber nailed across each other.... with her arm-width only of slightly less length than the height of head and handle, her tatty pink frock an old stitched-together duster with the grain of its fabric threadbared by rubbing and her face a triangle of blobs beneath a tassel of multicoloured wool. How could Tom have been so enthralled by the puppet show when its cut and thrust merely involved such clumsy abortions of wood?

The audience was intended to return the ‘dead’ puppets to the puppeteer after the end of the show but, somehow, that day, Tim managed to abscond with Judy. Tim, however, didn’t have a conscience about it. No doubt, the puppeteer could easily magick up a surrogate. Tim subsequently heard that the puppet show packed up that very same night and trundled off to other dates on the other side of the Pennines. Growing out of fashion, in any event, were such live entertainments. Screens bore real things to them or, at least, what many could believe to be real. The years brought new and newer fangled phenomena in geometrical progression of frequency. Meantime, Tim grew up to be a computer programmer, having placed Judy in a bottom drawer along with the strange sausages, whispering to himself, if not to her, a few words of blessing:

“That’s the way to do it.”

The craft halted in mid-air. Except it wasn’t air as such nor, even, a cross between air and space. Not an empty atmosphere. Not a souped-up void. Not a rarified gas. More a pudding without ingredients. Shapes and forms were indistinguishable, as Tim stared through the swirlscreen to gauge the gases and gain guidance as to his whereabouts. He cursed the craft’s pilot system: to be steered by a source which was based dark years in the distance was quite outrageous. How in heaven’s name could the Comptroller with his faster-than-dark manipulation-console be able to appreciate the various niceties of the craft’s course? Tim instinctively wanted to be a hands-on nautician and he yearned for the good old days when craft had on-board joysticks. Even an Automatic Pilot, if it were stationed within the catchment of the craft’s exterior form, would have been preferable to an arms-length puppet-Comptroller.

A direct no-holds barred steerage would at least have granted him something with which to fill his mind. Idle hands made a dull brain. Tim shrugged. He discerned a ridge - one of many indicating he’d soon arrive at his high noon perspective. The destination, indeed, was at the mid-point of immediacy. With the Comptroller consigned to a consummation of the past, the craft’s nose widdershinned, hatching its wheels like steel-edged eggs. Tim’s swirlscreen was filled with a swampy bog to every horizon, yet each glimpse told him that the previous glimpse hadn’t stuck. The Comptroller, who must have already been dead for at least a hundred Earth years, had a lot for which to answer, his ancient puppet-string tweaks of the terrestrial controls having brought Tim’s present moment to this centrifugal frictionlessness of primeval slime - more worthy of a past than a future.

Here to rescue a damsel in distress, Tim wondered whether anything warranted such an outlandish rendezvous with Fate. Sloshing through into appearance from behind where it couldn’t have possibly hidden lumbered a clacking-jawed, fiery-nostrilled beast, with sausage-like paps: a creature which matched nothing in the presumably now out-dated textbook with which Tim had been provided to prepare himself for this visit. And all for what? The damsel in danger from this miscegenation of a dragon and a crocodile was, at the end of the day, the Comptroller’s sweetheart, not Tim’s.

To fight the dragon-jaws was not the least of it, either. The external light, let alone the ‘air’, was doubtless tanked up on antiquity, and he’d have to don another body, a body more aligned with the chronological environment, simply to be able to use his own mind out there. There were several bodies to choose from, all currently laid out in the craft’s vivatory, the choice depending on the alien forces mustering against him. Having established the nature of the ‘dragon’, Tim had no choice but to slip into the St George body-puppet. Why Tim had not been provided with simply one all-purpose, heavily-armed body, rather than an array of physiques and proclivities, he had never really paused to consider. Like life itself, there had to be choices, there had to be the possibility of failure: or, otherwise, ends would seek different means.

The damsel thought Tim’s craft was a ludicrous botched-up job, shining more silver than her mind-built archetype Heaven. It looked like a tureen of angel airfish. More an allegory than an actuality. Yet when there emerged a four-limbed, one-headed shape that had no form other than itself, tottering as if new-born, bearing a larger-than-itself hunk-spitroast shield and sporting a red-cross on its romper-suit, well, she laughed out loud. This lumbering lampoon of Mediaeval man was indeed Tim himself, one of the Fate Comptroller’s arms-length creatures, no doubt. The only way to get her own back was to flame off its layers with her version of fiery passion. And to get actually inside it for forwarding back: a pudding-club without a foregone conclusion of a recipe. Her laugh out loud had been more like a surrogate dragon’s roar....

The Punch-and-Judy puppet show eventually returned to Tim’s neck of the woods. After all these years, the kids had to be frog-marched there by parents with time-swapping aspirations. The same curved lay-out of wooden seats, if a little more rickety. The gaping-mouthed sentry-box: with stripes fast fading into its awning’s weave. The squawky voice now with death rather than a common cold as its undernote. The puppets no different than their cross-legged ancestors all those years ago when Tim himself was tinier than Tom Thumb.

Tim watched his own small daughter amid her surly peers, as she sat squarely staring at the wooden acting. He had needed to persuade her to tear herself away from her fantasy computer games by saying that he had loved Punch and Judy shows when he was a lad.

“I don’t like any of those silly puppets - can’t I stay at home?” she said.

He had kissed her flat nose, as if to say something he couldn’t otherwise say. And, at a seamless moment in the puppet proceedings, Tim lost control of his own body as it dashed into the midst of the audience, intent on throwing his daughter into the crocodile’s jaws. Perhaps, her mother, Tim’s dear damsel wife, had not, after all, been so cruelly crucified upon the cross of their daughter’s birth. Judith had been their only child.... He wept, believing this was the only way he could say how much he’d loved them both. His way to do it.


“The saddest sight of all is the automobiles parked outside the mills and the factories. The automobile stands out in mind as the very symbol of falsity and illusion. They don’t realise that when the American worker steps out of his shining tin chariot he delivers himself body and soul to the most stultifying labour man can perform.” - Henry Miller


(Published ‘Axiom’ 1995)