Digby Durrant

Oh, my Papa!

issue 15 October 2005

Miles Kington, humourist-at-large from the moment he was born, which he remembers because a shadowy figure had snapped at him that he’s pressed for time, what does he want to be, girl or boy? He arrives to find himself surrounded by an unusually colourful family. Father, a very short man who is made all the shorter by the thinness of his wartime socks, had recently failed to get into midget submarines. Hasn’t he noticed there hasn’t been a pantomime production of Snow White since 1937? The navy has recruited all the dwarfs they needed. Instead he’d got a job pretending to be a spy to test the alertness of the British public. Speaking in a heavy foreign accent, occasionally breaking into a little German, reading an old German newspaper, peering through binoculars and obsessively clicking his camera with no film in it and still nobody took a blind bit of notice.

The mother is fairly sane but for her habit of retiring to her bedroom to prepare for death: ‘Oh, Lord, not gone to meet her Maker again, has she?’ When his elder brother, Ralph, lands the part of a corpse in an Agatha Christie play and starts rehearsing she complains that with her considerable experience of dying she should have been consulted.

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