The Rope Slider's Wife, by Graham Attenborough

He was a fool for flight. It was, she knew, his true love and always would be.

His father had taken him to the heights when Robert was but a small boy; he had told her how scared he had been at first but fear was soon replaced by rapture.

As a boy, Robert had taken to the towers and spires with such enthusiasm that his steeple jack father's initial delight had soon been replaced with foreboding. A healthy respect for danger and a clear awareness of certain death, if mistakes were made, was essential for such a trade. Young Robert seemed oblivious to his father's concerns and was soon performing daring tricks for the people who aways stood watching in the churchyards below. He would sit or lie on the edge of the curtain walls of the tower tops waving. He would stand on one leg, dance, pretend to lose his footing and cling precariously with one hand from weathercocks. Gradually, he became famous for these antics and money quickly came his way. Encouraged, his father gave up admonishing his son and began to assist him, devising ways for Robert to delight the growing crowds whilst, at the same time, doing so in relative safety.

Ironically, it was his father and not Robert who lost his life in a needless fall. It was on the day that young Robert Cadman married his sweetheart Lucy. Thanks to Robert, the family had prospered. They had bought a fine house in Candle Lane Shrewsbury and, on the the day of the wedding, the elder Cadman decided to hang celebratory bunting from the upper casements. Full of ale, he had climbed out onto the sill, the better to sing and banter with his neighbours in the street. He lost his footing, fell, dashing out his brains on the cobbles below.

His heartbroken widow soon followed her husband to the grave and it fell to the pragmatist Lucy to take charge. Lucy had been a serving-girl at The Lion. Like everyone in the town she knew of its famous son Robert Cadman and had watched the rope slider perform his tricks up on the steeples. When first she met him, whilst walking beside the river on summer evenings, she discovered a young man who lived for the thrill of the moment, a man bursting with enthusiasm to please others, a loving and loveable man but one without an ounce of business sense.

Lucy took control. She it was who designed and made his costume. She who had bills and posters printed well in advance of a performance, and she it was who worked the crowds with her winning smile and a large hat within which she collected the monies due, just reward for the risks her husband took for the pleasure of others.        

They did well. They had a child. A girl whom they christened Susan. They extended their property, became known and well respected about the town. They owned their own wagon and two fine mares who pulled them around the countryside. They traveled far and wide.

And then... And then Robert set up his act to fly across the frozen river Severn from St. Mary's spire into the Gay Meadow; a performance he had given many times before.

The frost fair was in full swing on the morning of the 2nd of February 1740 and the crowds began to swell as Robert walked up the rope from the meadow performing daredevil tricks as he went. Lucy worked the crowd collecting money and explaining that, once at the steeples summit, her husband would slid back down at such speed that the friction would cause his wooden breastplate to heat up and billow out smoke behind him. Within the hour he had reached the top of the steeple and begun his descent. He had even fired off his pistols but something was clearly wrong because he began to signal that the rope was pulled too taut. Lucy stiffened as she watched. Suddenly the crowd gasped and she saw Robert fall away. The rope sprang out across St. Mary's Friars its snapped end aglow with flame. Even from the opposite bank of the river she heard the collective scream from the horrified onlookers as Robert's body hit the iron-hard ground below.

As Lucy Cadman began to run wildly down the bank towards the frozen river she dropped her hat, almost full of money, upon the frosty grass where eagle-eyed beggar boys quickly swooped to claim their share.

The rope sliders wife saw nothing of this. As she ran, she disappeared from history.

Robert Cadman was twenty eight years old.

The rope sliders wife's name is not recorded. Her existence remains a short footnote in her husbands story.

Copyright Graham Attenborough (2014).

Offline, by Graham Attenborough

She was taken from her cell by two guards in their google uniforms. At the end of a long white corridor, still flanked by her guards, she was greeted by a smiling young woman who looked up briefly from a glowing tablet as she was brought in to a gleaming office, then looked down again.

'Please sit,' said a man sat behind a Habitat table adorned with a magnificent digitalised flowering plant.   She sat, the one-piece paper suit they had given her to wear crackling as she did so. 'What is your username'? the man asked.  She said nothing. 'Your google account? Amazon? What is your smart phone number?'  'I don't have a mobile' she said, 'or a username, a blog, a Facebook page or a google account. In fact, I don't even have a fucking computer - okay!'

They all looked at her as though she'd just said that she butchered babies for a living.  The man turned to his screen, tapped on it a couple of times and turned it towards her. Immediately she recognised herself walking along a fairly busy street. She saw that as other people walked along, the giant billboard screens flashed up their usernames and quickly directed them to their next shopping destination. A hint of a smile danced across her lips as she saw how the screens went blank as she passed them, unable to identify all her consumer wants and needs.

'As a matter of fact,' he said, 'no, it's not okay. Do you even have a bank account?'

'No' she said, 'I do not have a bank account. I don't want a bloody bank account and I have a democratic right not to have one if I choose.'  

The man laughed.'Oh, democracy. That old chestnut. Didn't you know? We have no need of democracy in the age of google because we have no need of governance. We are all free and equal under google. The world has moved on, my dear. You see, you and your kind are still living in the bad old days. That's why you insist on calling yourselves neo Luddites and Latter-day Diggers. They tried to halt progress too, didn't they, and of course they failed. I suggest you read about them sometime, on Wikipedia, that is - when you're back online. And you will be back online, reconnected to the net, because that is the only rule passed down by google in its all-consuming wisdom.  

'As I say' he went on, 'we are all free to choose under google but our choices must be made online. That is the rule. Everything we will ever need is to be found on the worldwide web and you must be a part of the great google family. Otherwise, well, you are nothing, nothing but a shadow, a waste of digits, an affront to consumerism. Someone like you is a non unit. You might as well be dead.'

'Are you actually saying,' the woman said, 'that our only purpose is to shop? To buy stuff online?' 'Of course', the man replied. 'What other purpose could we possibly have?'  She looked at the man aghast. She longed to go home, to her dogs, to her books and her vegetable garden. She didn't need google to be fulfilled. She only needed her freedom, her friends, love.  She said: 'you can't force me. You can give me an iPad and a username but I just won't log on. I don't want you, I don't need you.'

The man sat back in his chair and laced his fingers into a steeple.  He said, 'Nonsense, we all need google. Google is us and we are google. You see my dear, if you were online and keeping abreast of google events, you would know that the latest google nanotechnology means that we can now connect you to the web intravenously. You should consider yourself privileged, you shall be one of the first units on earth not merely to be connected but  actually to be a living part of google itself. There shall be no logging off, even as your physical body sleeps, you shall live and breath within the net, being updated instantaneously. I'm envious I can tell you. Just imagine, you will be as one with google, and, gradually, as this marvellous, google-given technology is rolled out, more and more of us will join you, our minds and bodies sharing forever the power and the glory of the one great google!'

Realising there was no escape from this madness, the woman began to panic. She stood up and tried to run, but the two google guards grabbed her by the arms and held her fast. 'They will take you down to the technicians now,' said the man kindly, 'we shall meet again my dear, online.' 

He stood to attention, tapped his chest with his right hand before stretching his arm out before him. 'Google be praised' he said, and the others responded.

'Praise be to Google!'

Her legs gave way beneath her.

Wild, by Graham Attenborough

Ironic, is it not, that I, of all men, should find myself roughly jostled about in this filthy wooden cart. And on such a journey too. I do not write this short tract to justify my life. I know who and what manner of man I am. I wish only to make the most of this, my exit from the stage.

Look at all these faces along the route. I should be gratified. I'm not. I recognise a few. Those simpering sycophants who would come to my office off the Old Bailey, squealing about their pilfered pocket watches, their silk kerchiefs, their family heirlooms. I, who came into this world with nothing, who worked and schemed and fought my way to riches. I was the man they ran to for help, to retrieve their treasures. Fools! Did they think me a magician? A seer? Did they believe I was a good man, their friend?

They did. They thought I actually scoured the stinking taverns and rotten rookeries of the city, like a bloodhound, sniffing out their precious stolen baubles. When all the while - and still it makes me smile to think of it - their silly trinkets were safely locked within my strongbox, just a few steps from where they sat.

I ran it all you see. All the pickpockets, house breakers and footpads of London Town worked for me, were in my pay and none would dare to cheat me. They went about their business doing my business, reporting back to me until I double crossed their names from my ledger. Alas, I went to far with that. But what was I to do? Catching thieves was my profession, ergo, some were sacrificed to the drop.

Blueskin Blake was my mistake. He thought me his friend, he thought us equal in the game. That's why I scratched the second cross against his name. But instead of sealing his fate, I sealed mine. He knew too much and found the time to tell it, to shout it out for all to hear. The magistrate set off the hue and cry and sent his hired louts for me.

Ah well, tis the nature of the game. I have won so many times, eventually I had to lose. And now, well here I am, the centre of this sorry spectacle. The shouts and jeers grow fierce and the coach curtains of the rich, twitch, with anticipation. It is time to hand this scrap to Mister Defoe. He may make of it what he will.

I see it now, the Tyburn Tree. I've seen it many times before but, this day, it waits for me.

For I, am Jonathan Wild. Thief-Taker General.

I have played my part.

The Atheist, by Graham Attenborough

On the day of resurrection, no one was more astonished than the atheist.

He woke from nothing into an utter darkness and had quickly established that he was confined within a small, damp-smelling box.  That realisation had induced sheer panic and he found himself screaming uncontrollably.  He kicked and punched and trashed about and then, with a sense of elation, felt the wooden walls fall away.  The solid, six feet of earth above him parted with ease - it was almost as though he were swimming through it. Without any real effort, his head burst into bright sunshine, hurting his eyes as he breathed deeply of the warm, clean air.  

The churchyard scene reminded the atheist of Stanley Spencer's Cookham Resurrection.  Bewildered men, women and children leaned or sat upon their own headstones.  Some wept with joy hugging loved ones whilst others knelt besides their open graves thanking God for granting them eternal life. 

At first, the atheist could do nothing but stare with incredulous wonder but soon his observant, questing mind began to take notice of detail.  There were perhaps three hundred people in the meagre village graveyard.  Others were emerging, mole-like, all around and he realised that no one appeared to be more than in their early thirties.  Including himself.  Yet he distinctly remembered his eightieth birthday.  He saw also, that everyone's burial clothes were in a pristine condition despite many having been dead for hundreds of years. 

As he watched the jubilation, he began to feel a sense of loneliness. The atheist had never married, had no children, few friends, preferring always to be the solitary scholar. His previous life, the atheist now considered, had been lived selfishly.  A sedentary existence, lived only for self gratification, shunning others and lacking in so much that constituted being fully human.  Now, here at the resurrection, surrounded by long lost loves, reunited, his aloneness pained him.

To his right he heard the gentle sobbing of a woman. She wore a delicate white Empire Line dress with matching Mop Cap and had clearly lived over two hundred years before himself.

The atheist stood before her. He held her long, warm hands and gazed into her depthless, timeless eyes. This simple human contact electrified him.  She smiled and he fell in love. His pure heart pumped love through his perfect veins as his imagination soared on wings of possibility.

Suddenly, the sky cracked and split asunder.  The atheist looked up and stared into the awful face of God.

Graham Attenborough (2014)