“Won’t it be dangerous?” he asked.
“Only if you have a descendant who was a Mountain Goat, I would imagine.”
“Might have,” said Chris, “I was adopted.”
In 1986, Freddie Ryan Emlyn Davies is just a poor boy, living in Norwich, recently divorced and spends his time in the Pub.
A life changing event leads him to find that he is the direct descendent of the magician Merlin, and he must defeat a witch from a different dimension bent on plunging the world into abject misery to serve her need for power.
A message encrypted by the Mercury Code leads him and his friends to the final battle to decide the fate of the Earth at a Queen concert at Wembley Stadium.
Freddie has to beat the Witch – but he only has a feather duster; and the most evil entity in the Universe is his ex-wife.
Excerpt
His Grandfather had been ‘One of the Few’ in the Second World War and spent the last two years of the conflict as a prisoner, languishing in the infamous Colditz Camp. He did not spend his time in captivity idling away the days, he escaped nine times.
In one heroic escape attempt, he tunnelled for two miles using only the upper plate of a pair of false teeth ‘borrowed’, on a permanent basis, from a German guard to dig with, and tunnel supports whittled from animal bones salvaged from the Officer’s Mess dustbins. If it had not been for the smell attracting the guard dogs, the attempt would have succeeded. It had been a feat made even more impressive when you consider the fact that he had lost both legs, one of his arms and half his face. Not, as you would expect, coming second in some spectacularly heroic dogfight with a Messerschmidt F109, but in a bar brawl with some Navy ratings in a brothel in Southampton. His captors had removed all his artificial limbs after his sixth escape attempt, but that only served as a bigger incentive.
Working only in the dead of night by the light of a three inch candle he had made from cooking fat and a shoe lace, he crafted a new pair of legs from wood obtained from an old grand piano he had found in the attic of his prison quarters, and a make-shift arm from a few cooking utensils and a tennis racket.
His valiant, and only successful, ninth escape was in May 1945. He had spent fifteen months building a gigantic kite from all the Monopoly boards that the Red Cross had been sending the POW’s. He had used the chewing gum, from the same parcels, to stick the whole thing together.
It was not until he launched himself off the roof of Colditz Castle in the early morning sunshine that he discovered the flaw in his brilliant plan.
Due to half of his face no longer being part of his head, he had found the chewing of the gum quite difficult, and, to assist him in facilitating a speedy escape, he softened the gum using another candle and a soup ladle. Unfortunately, the interaction of saliva was vital to the adhesive quality of the gum and, as he hovered above the wooded splendour of the Saxony countryside awaiting the gust of wind that would swoop him to freedom, the individual boards that fashioned the diligently crafted kite parted company and Squadron Leader Edwin Morgan Bethesda Davis, DFC and Bar, plummeted to a near fatal contact with the Fatherland of his mortal enemy.
The mutilated remains of his almost dead body were retrieved by the approaching allied Russian troops and carefully placed in the medical facility in the now liberated Castle, it was the final day of the conflict and Germany had surrendered that morning.
His subsequent horrific injuries and resulting amputation of several remaining vital parts of his anatomy meant that the rest of the brave Squadron Leader’s life was spent as a head on a pillow in the Penyfai Hospital just outside Bridgend.
Not to waste his time there this plucky little War Hero, using only his remaining teeth, managed to fabricate a brass plate that could be fitted on his head to replace the half of his face that was missing. It looked splendid, when finished, and complemented the half-dozen medals that had been pinned to the pillow beside him; especially the bronze medallion from all his old friends at the Maesteg United Services Club. He had died of a particularly serious case of dandruff in ninety seventy-four, at the age of one hundred and three. Freddie still had the quarter inch bolt and wing nut made out of brass he had been bequeathed in his Grandfather’s will, nestled in his wallet.
South Wales did not really offer an adventurous life in nineteen seventy-six; so, full of false ideals of the romance of the Battle of Britain, Freddie left home at the age of seventeen and joined the Royal Air Force. Originally he wanted to be an Armourer, but after a bout of pneumonia laid him low for several weeks, his training slipped so far behind it was decided that he would retrain. He decided to train as an Assistant Photographic Interpreter learning to extract intelligence from aerial photography, a job that saw him travel all over the world. His last adventure in the Service had been in the Falklands Crisis when he saw action with the Task Force on the aircraft carrier Hermes. Freddie always thought this typified his lot in life, he had spent all his Air Force life training to operate from airfields, and at the first sign of a war- he was put on a boat.
The Wholly Book of Genesis is a humorous satire on the first book of the Old Testament where the Story of Creation, the building of Noah's Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah and the families of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are thoroughly spoofed and broadsided.
