The Smiley family tree

Every week in Castleford the church bells rang out to remind parishioners it was Sunday. And there was to be no lying in bed on the Sabbath. Sometimes, the bell peeler flung in an extra ring-a-rung to remind the good people of Castleford that the ugly baby competition was to take place that day.

The village babies were laid out, biggest to smallest. They writhed, their little hands pumping, and their not so cute little heads and necks exposed like cod, gasping for holy air, on the cool marble of the transept. On one side, separating priest from penitent, sat the King and Queen,on their crafted gold thrones, just under God, with the kind of bored look that had been carefully sculpted over generations.

The villagers knelt before them and God, as the pastor conducted a tapestry of orchestrated noise which wafted up like incense, a hymnal of praise, to all the great things the King and Queen had done for them. But those were mere words. To give even greater honour to them, the villages banded together to make a special display cabinet for all the trophies the ugly babies won. It was made of the finest granite with little shelves cut into stone; silver plaques shining out like eyes and a simple inscription: “Castleford’s Ugly Baby” and the year.

The special display cabinet, the villagers had built, was the only ornamentation the Smiley family had in their simple cottage, which lacked even a window. But the villagers had cut them another door, as the cabinet took up most of the room. The Smiley family squeezed into a drab corner like Emperor penguins, standing on top of each other’s toes, but not standing with their back to a brother or sister, which was seen as bad manners. And if they felt like a change they could trek out one door, one after the other, and into the other drab corner on the other side of the cabinet room.

The Smiley family were not proud people, but they had 17 plaques for seventeen babies and the stonemason had carved out another 17 niches, for Mrs. Smiley was still a young and fertile woman. And another baby was beyond the planning stage.

After working drab day after day, planting row after row of cabbages and broccoli in the fields, the villagers would find themselves pulled toward the glamour of the display cabinet that no other village, in no other kingdom, had

The village children were considered too young to take part in such visits. Education was greatly valued. But the schoolhouse that they attended didn’t have much in it. No desks or chairs, no blackboard, or chalk. And no paper or books. But it did have a schoolteacher. And it did have a preponderance of Smiley children.

The schoolteacher, Master Jones, used all the resources to hand, or foot, or nose. Thus the nose of one Smiley child was measured in terms of the relative proportions of the other brother’s hump. When the villagers went to the local dress making shop, for example, they would order two snouters of the best linen and have the dress humped in at the waist; three snouters being equal to one hump. Snouter Smiley’s nose and Humpy Smiley’s hump would be used like a slide rule in the shop, when there were angry words and a disparity between two measurements, which was especially prevalent during the madness of the ballroom season.

Master Jones was at the forefront of more modern pastimes. When his brother, Jerimiah, sent him a letter informing him that he had discovered a creature called a monkey, Master Jones paced and paced and could not quite work out how such a thing could happen. He wondered if it was a great hoax that his brother was playing upon him, like the idea, in his last letter, that there was such thing as a floating island called a whale, that sank beneath the waves at night and reappeared in a different place during daylight hours.

Or that there was such a thing as an elephant, which was the size of the schoolhouse, with a thing called a trunk, like a long hose, that it used to eat. Master Jones knew that was not possible, because hoses could not chew. Neither was it possible that such a creature could walk. It would be like expecting the schoolhouse to grow legs and wander away.

But when he looked up, letter in hand, from his long peregrination through the lands of taxonomy, the eldest Smiley boy caught his eye. The boy looked away, but not quickly enough.

‘Quick lads get your sticks,’ shouted Master Jones.

There had not been such a great scramble since all the animals had tried to get on Noah’s Ark without queuing in a civilised manner. Soon his pupils stood, out of breath, before Master Jones with a stick in hand, for his unusual ways were not unusual to them.

‘Not you!’ said Master Jones blowing out his cheeks in frustration and hitting the eldest Smiley boy a hard rap on the knuckles of each hand, so that he dropped his stick.

‘What now sir?’ said one of the braver pupils, near the back of the classroom, were it was best for brave pupils to hide.

‘Why,’ said Master Jones astonished his pupils didn’t recognize what had to be done, ‘chase him up a tree’. And with this he hit the eldest Smiley a sharp blow to the head with his teaching stick.

All the children pushed and jostled around the eldest Smiley boy and got in each other’s way as they tried to hit him. But the boy, as well as being bigger than them, was also quicker, and was soon out the classroom door. Even when outside he fell under a rain of blows, he picked himself up and made a run for it. His long arms lifted him up into the safety of the lower limbs of the Oak tree in the schoolyard.

‘Ah,’ said Master Jones, ‘a monkey indeed,’ looking on and sniffing, satisfied, that there could be such a creature as his brother had described.

‘What do monkeys eat, sir?’ said one of the sniggering Brown twins.

‘What do you eat Monkey Smiley?’ asked Master Jones, sneering at the boy sitting in the branches of the Oak.

‘Why sir,’ he finally warbled out, ‘we eat broccoli, chewed broccoli’.

His brothers on the ground nodded in agreement. The national dish, celebrated throughout all the land, was roast beef, potatoes and broccoli, but nearly everyone spat their broccoli out into a broccoli bowl at the side of the table.

‘Ah,’ said Master Jones, his jowls moved in rumination as he chewed on the idea, before giving his final deliberation, ‘monkeys eat…chewed broccoli’.

The church bells tolled. Master Jones, the school children and the workers in the fields stopped what they were doing and looked uncertainly towards the church. Master Jones put his hand in front of his face and counted, just to make sure it was not Sunday disguised as a weekday, but he needed to keep starting again. Arithmetic was not his favourite subject.

A bugle fanfare sounded out from the King and Queen’s castle and joined the ringing of the bells. The villagers in the field and Master Jones and the children flung up their caps up in the air and cheered until they became hoarse. But they didn’t really know why. They supposed they had won another war, in a far and distant land, where they always won wars.

The light touch of violin music seeped into their ears, circling and sinking in slowly, before they realized what it meant. It was an old piece, written before many of the villagers were born, called: “Thank God, the King has a baby son”.

The King, of course, had a preponderance of daughters, each more beautiful than the last. Each year, when the ground was hard enough to support a cavalcade through the village, all the young princes from far and wide came bringing gifts for the King and Queen. An extension had to be added to the palace. And that was not even big enough. The palace kept growing, outwards, like a potato plant. The king finally had a signwriter design a tasteful sign, which he put outside the drawbridge: “No Silver! (just gold)”.

The princesses, in all their finery, sat fidgeting on their thrones, in a diagonal line down the long hall, youngest of marriageable age, to oldest. The villagers had cut a special door at the end of the hall, with stairs attached, so that the princes could leave from the back of the castle.

The young princes raced from one to the other and asked only one question.

‘Will you marry me?’

‘No.’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘No.’
As the princes got near the end of the room they faltered. The elder princesses had taken to wearing a veil that covered their faces, but still the princes, propelled forward by mystery and momentum, asked, and the answer remained the same:

‘No.’
‘No.’
‘No.’

The law, written in small print, on the sign outside the moat clearly stated princesses could not marry, until the King and Queen had a boy child.

A far older law also stated that the ugly baby competition was reversed on the seventh Sunday following a potential monarch boy child’s birth. Only the most beautiful baby selected could become the next King.

Each baby boy was laid out in church, on the seventh Sunday, biggest to smallest. The King and Queen shifted about in their thrones, as if they could not get quite comfortable, as Master Jones walked back and forth between the candidates. It was very difficult. But Master Jones had been selected to judge because of his modern learning. He walked slowly from one to another, looking at the different dimensions of the babies’ heads and bodies and how they curled their fingers. He was only allowed to touch one baby, and that would be the future king. So he looked carefully at the colouring of the babies skin, and glanced at the Queen whose head imperceptibly shifted in a certain direction, leaving Master Jones with two baby candidates. He covered up his nose to look at one. It seemed to be in the wrong competition, but it did have a little bejewelled gold crown firmly attached to its misshapen head. The other child was wrapped in burlap, but light filtered through the stain glass window and seemed to illuminate its gummy smile. Master Jones looked between one and the other. The tallest footman in the seven kingdoms glided in beside him and whispered in his ear. It was a bluff. A test of Master Jones character. It was as likely as there being whales in the water, or elephants on the land.

Master Jones turned triumphantly towards the King and Queen, holding up the boy child.

Behind him Mrs Smiley sobbed. She didn’t want her little son to be the next King.