The Chickens of Atlantis and Other Foul and Filthy Fiends

Steve Campbell, Tim Mavrick, Richard Scott, Richard Fair-gray, Stu Dall, Nick Reekie, Jonathan Crawford, Lee ‘Prist’ Hughes, Ali Salmon, Gavin Lloyd Wilson, Ian Crighton, Kit Cox, Robert Otley, James Southard, Rachel Ball Rat, Steve Lowdell, Xymon Owain, Richard Warne, Spike Livingstone, Jenny Owen, Trevor Pyne, Nigel Haveron, Jon Sykes, the lovely Rachel Hayward and the real Mr Cameron Bell.

The late, great James Stuart Campbell.

‘All ideas are true somewhere.’

Leonard Susskind

‘It is only by attempting the impossible

that we achieve the absurd.’

Norman Hartnell

‘Absurdity is the only reality.’

Frank Zappa

‘The past is the new future.’

Darwin (The Educated Ape)

y name is Darwin and I am a monkey butler.

I have travelled through space, I have travelled through time, and I have had many adventures.

My earliest memories are not pleasant to recall, full of stench and of ghastliness, of many bells chiming, of coarse cries and clamour and I all alone and in fear.

I awoke to sensibility in a cage on a Tilbury dock. The year was eighteen ninety; the month, I believe, was May. I have no knowledge of my parents, my tribe or even the country in which I was born. Upon my passport and papers of travel I am now identified as ‘a citizen of London’, and I take pride in this, for within that great and ancient city I have enjoyed more happiness than sorrow, made more friends than enemies and acquainted myself with artists and musicians, knights and noblemen and members of the Royal Household.

I recall too clearly the kicking at my cage and a great face, all red and wildly whiskered, calling upon me to dance. The breath of this face was tainted with liquor, and the eyes of this face were fierce.

At that time I spoke not a word of the Queen's English and as such was limited in my means of communication. My response to the assault upon my tender senses lacked then the sophistication I now enjoy and I make no pretence to the contrary. And so it was there, upon that clamorous, foul-smelling dock, that I committed my first social gaffe. For I produced dung and hurled it!

This act, construed no doubt as one of defiance, was met with a brutal rejoinder: a shaking of my cage, which increased in vigour until it reached an intolerable degree and I passed from consciousness once again.

Cold water awakened me to a room with air made dense by tobacco smoke. A roguish type in a colourful suit wrought a brisk tattoo upon the bars of my little prison with the business end of a swagger-stick and called out to an audience before him. I was announced as, ‘Lot thirty-two. A monkey of cheerful disposition. Eager to learn and as fine a fellow as might grace an organ-grinder's in-stri-ha-ment and lure many pennies into an old tin cup.’

Hungry then was I and bitter at the shaking I had received. And so, I confess, I did not exhibit that cheerful disposition attributed to me by the chap in the colourful suit. I made loud my protests in my ancestral tongue and had I been capable of producing further faeces I would gladly have done so. And gladly hurled them, too.

I was sold for the princely sum of twelve shillings to a gentleman named George Wombwell, the proprietor of a travelling menagerie, and it was he who named me Darwin.

Mr Wombwell was a kindly man, whom I feel harboured a genuine love for the animals in his charge. At the time when I accompanied him on his meanderings along the highways and by-roads of southern England, he owned a
pair of charming elephants, a lion of evil intent, numerous trained kiwi birds and performing chickens, a ‘pig of knowledge’ and a mermaid.

The mermaid was a fascinating creature. It appeared for all the world to be part-monkey and part-fish, although the monkey portion never spoke to me. Around and around that creature swam in a vast spherical bowl and many were the heads that shook in wonder. It was many, many years before I saw its like again, and then in somewhat outré circumstances.

Although initially belligerent and uneager to cooperate, I found myself gently won over to Mr Wombwell's wishes. I learned that to please him garnered rewards which, like as not, came in the shape of bananas. To displease him, however, occasioned a falling from grace characterised by an absence of these yellow delicacies.

I learned quickly and became most obliging.

I could write much regarding my travels with Mr Wombwell, for indeed my days with that singular gentlemen were rarely ever dull. We moved from town to village and like-abouts, mostly bringing happiness to those who patronised our performances. I became adept at juggling, tomfoolery, pratfalls and ‘tricks above ground’. I well remember the happy cries of children and the merry jingle of Mr Wombwell's brass cash register. I learned tricks enough to please him and gained an understanding of the English tongue, although at that time I was unable to vocalise and express myself through words. There was the occasional unpleasantness.

I will not belabour my reader with tales of the travelling life. Mr Wombwell has published his autobiography, and although his recollections differ somewhat from my own regarding the extent of his successes, the gist is very much the same as any account I could give.

Now, a man must adapt to what he cannot control, and so too must a monkey. I have lived upon other worlds and encountered beings who, although sharing a common sun with men of Earth, inhabit such strange forms and hold to such quaint manners as to baffle my small senses. These beings do not cogitate like men, but they do exhibit certain attitudes which display, to my thinking, what might be described as an all-but-universal constant.

That of tribalism.

My first experience of this was with Mr Wombwell's Travelling Menagerie. Showmen and circus folk consider themselves a race apart. The ‘hicks’ or ‘rubes’ or ‘billy-docks’ or ‘nadgers’ who attend their performances and fill their coffers are ‘not as they’. Showmen and circus folk are of a tribe that keeps itself apart. They look after their own and hold most others in the lowest form of contempt. Such, sadly, I have found to be the case throughout all levels of society, on this world and elsewhere.

History records that in the year eighteen eighty-five, King Phnarrg of Mars declared war upon the British Empire. He sent a mighty fleet of space-going warships to attack and destroy the subjects of Queen Victoria. Few there are, however, who understand that this was a religious crusade. The Martian tribe considered itself composed of God's chosen people and Mankind to be an impure race of idolaters, fit only for extermination.

Tribalism is the tragedy of the sentient being, and I, who have visited the past and the future, can see no end to it.

I gathered what learning I could from Mr Wombwell and also from others in his employ, for although I was at that time unable to utter words of English, I was perfectly able to converse with others of my ‘tribe’: to wit, the animal kingdom.

A rooster named Junior talked long into the nights with me. He was a prodigious conversationalist and a cock of a religious bent. Junior held to the belief that Mankind had descended from chickens, that the first fowl had been placed upon the Earth by Lop Lop, God of the Birds, and the Great Mother Hen who dwelt on her cosmic nest. I later came to understand that a gentleman whose name I shared held to not dissimilar beliefs – his, however, involved ape-like antecedents.

I will not at this juncture inform the reader as to which of these theories is correct. Although the title of this tome might have released the pussy of metaphor from the sack of obfuscation, thereby saving it from a drowning in the village pond of Penge.

In the year of eighteen ninety-four, I resigned from Mr Wombwell's employ. I am of a mercurial disposition and have what my good friend Sigmund Freud would term ‘a limited span of attention’. I had by this year gained sufficient understanding to realise that the itinerant life held little charm for myself. I had become an ape of ambition and now held to the conviction that I should seek my fortune in the great, good-hearted City of London.

My opportunity to take my leave came one night after a performance at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. An inebriate cage-boy had inadequately secured the fastenings upon my quarters and I stole quietly away into the night.

The closing years of the nineteenth century were, regrettably, characterised by debauchery and decadence. Whether this is the case in every century, I know not. My experiences in several, however, lead me to believe that this is the rule rather than the exception.

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