The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms. Ian Thornton

       Copyright

      The Friday Project

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published by The Friday Project in 2013

      Copyright © Ian Thornton 2013

      Cover Layout Design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

      Ian Thornton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780007551491

      Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008165932 Version: 2015-09-28

      To Heather, Laszlo and Clementine

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Dedication

      Prologue:

       A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism

Part One

1 Around the Time When Adolf Was a Glint in His First Cousin’s Eye

2 Pawn to Queen Four

3 Serendipity’s Day Off

4 The Butterflies Flutter By

Part Two

1 Fools Rush In

2 A Vision of Love (Wearing Boxing Gloves)

3 Drago Thoms: Pythagoras, Madness, and an Indian Summer in Bed

4 The Kama Sutra, Ganika, and Russian Vampires

5 We Are the Music Makers. We Are the Dreamers of Dreams.

6 A Sweet Deity of Debauchery

       7 A Day (or So) in the Country

       8 Just a Lucky Man Who Made the Grade

       9 The Accusative Case

       10 The Black Hand

       11 The Day Abu Hasan Broke Wind

       12 A Microcosm of the Apocalypse

       13 A Farewell of Scarlet Wax and Gardenia

       Part Three

       1 And the Ass Saw the Angel

       2 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part I)

       3 The Die Is Cast (aka Les Jeux Sont Faits)

       4 The Unlikely Bedfellow

       5 “Ciao Bello!”

       6 The March of Don Quixote

       7 In No-Man’s-Land

       8 “A Shadow Can Never Claim the Beauty of the Image”

       9 The Birth of Blanche in a Dangerous Ladbroke Grove Pub

       10 Cicero’s Fine Oceanarium of Spewed Wonders (1920–1932)

       11 Suffragettes, Mermaids, and Hooligans (1932)

       12 Let’s Rusticate Again

       13 Jackboots, Cleopatra, and the Bearded Lady (1932–1936)

       14 The Girl in the Tatty Blue Dress

       15 She Had a Most Immoral Eye (1937–1940)

       16 Archibald’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

       17 Then There Were Three Again

       18 Music, Brigadiers, and Marigold (1940)

       19 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part II)

       20 “Gawd Bless Ya, Gav’nah!”

       21 A Giant in the Promised Land

       22 Pepper’s Ghost, Fluffers, and a Brief Encounter

       Part Four

       1 “Everybody Ought to Go Careful in a City Like This” (1945)

       2 The Return of Abu Hasan

       3 The Brigadier’s Au Revoir

       4 The Veil

       5 A Blue Rose by Any Other Name

       6 Dragons, Confucius, and Snooker

       7 “I Know Who You Are!”

       8 The Death and Life of a Grim Reaper

       Epilogue

       Notes

       Acknowledgments

       About the Publisher

       Prologue

       A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism

       A rural cricket match in buttercup time, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead forever passing along our country lanes, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile.

      —J. M. Barrie

       2009. Northern England

      I sat with my grandfather Ernest in a very comfortable, spacious ward in the hospital in Goole. The doctors had said that he would not live for much more than a week.

      Goole is as Goole sounds, a dirty-gray inland