The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
You can’t always believe the evidence of your eyes! No one, I am sure, would ever accuse me of putting a bob on a horse. And yet! I was going through my pockets the other day and to my astonishment I found a bookie’s docket in my wallet. It was neatly folded up and I opened it, wondering what this note was in my pocket book. And there, believe it or not, was this telltale docket.
It is on my desk as I write, with date stamp on it and the printed name and address of the bookie. How it came to be there I just don’t know. All I do know is that it wasn’t my bob the bookie got.
Well that started me off thinking about the things we carry about in our pockets. A boy’s pockets are the most wonderful things imaginable, as mothers know when they get the trousers to do a bit of mending. Marbles and bits of string, and bent nails and the dear only knows what not, find their way into the dark recesses of every boy’s pockets.
And as for men! We are just grown-up boys. I counted the number of pockets I have, not including my overcoat, and I found that I have 12. And I have something in every one of them.
Women are content with fewer pockets but it’s wonderful what they can get into their handbags. Reminds me of what I read the other day somewhere. ‘The average woman has a much smaller vocabulary than a man but she has a much bigger turnover.'
There was an accident once in which a man was killed and no one knew anything about him. The police could find no clue. At the inquest, the Coroner asked the policeman: ‘Did you search his pockets?’ The policeman said he had and when he was asked what he had found, he said: ‘Sir, they were the cleanest pockets I have ever seen.’ Could you turn out the contents of your pockets without being ashamed of something?
There was once an absent-minded old minister. He smoked a pipe. One day he put it in his pocket without being sure that it was really out. So he burned a hole in his pocket. He was an easygoing sort. Never having been married he hadn’t much to worry him. One day a friend gave him some nasturtium seeds and said: ‘Don’t plant them until May, but stick them in your pocket where you won’t forget them. So he stuck them in the pocket with the burnt hole.
With shoving his hand into his pocket every now and then the packet got the worse for wear and soon it burst, so that as he visited all over the parish he unconsciously dropped a seed here and there. There was an old burnt-out car by the roadside an he toddled over to look at it, complaining that it should have been taken away long ago. As he poked about some of the seeds fell out. Then he went on to a little cottage and not being able to get in he outrageously peeped in at the window to see if there was anybody there and some more seeds dropped out at the window. And so it went on. Late in June when the old man remembered about the seeds he found that the packet was empty.
That summer a kind of miracle happened. Flaming nasturtiums in yellow and scarlet and red adorned the countryside. The burnt out car was draped in beauty so that the people stopped to look at it. Flowers crept up and peeped in at the window of an old lady who was bedridden. Nobody knew how it all happened; least of all the absent-minded old minister with the hole in his pocket. Or, if he did, he probably lit his pipe with the empty packet and chuckled to himself.
One of the most wonderful things in life is the good we sometimes do unconsciously. As we go about our daily task, meeting and talking with other folk, the influence that tells is the unconscious blessing of what we are and what we have to give. It is a pity that so few of us have holes in our pockets and burst bags.
George Gissing tells in ‘The Private Papers of Henry Rycroft’ how, going down the street he met a little fellow sobbing bitterly. He found he had lost sixpence which his mother had given him to pay a bill. ‘Sixpence dropped by the wayside,’ wrote Gissing, ‘and a whole family made miserable! I put my hand into my pocket and wrought sixpence worth of miracle.’
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