Tickling Toes

This is a short story of an incident in the Defence Services Staff College, Wellington, Nilgiris

 

At the Staff College, Wellington, the DS threw a surprise at us with his intention of grading us for future Directing Staff if anyone could impress him with a one minute extempore talk on any subject. I was trying to hide in the corner of the class contemplating on how best to get out of this situation, when he pointed his finger at me and said “Okay, Gonsalves, You’re up first. You have three minutes to prepare and one minute to speak and impress me.”

With my limited imagination, it was getting hard to think of a topic, let alone speak on it!  After two and a half minutes were up, I still hadn’t thought of anything. Then it suddenly dawned on me – why not narrate one of Aesop’s fables about the Frog who turned Prince.  It was my favourite bedtime story and my Mum used to tell it with such verve that I would immediately be transported to fairyland with a load croak.

I thought the story was pretty well said, but since the DS had even less imagination than me, he shook his head and said “Failed”. That single word altered the course of an otherwise very brilliant career.

Not being the one to give up on fairy tales so easily despite all the vituperations that came with it, I wrote out the story and offered to have it published in the DSSC Journal. Imagine my surprise, when the collective wisdom of all the DS’s at Wellington turned it down.  They simply said “No can publish” to my rendition of Frog who turned prince despite all the salacious stories about naval campaigns that the magazine carried. Nobody has time (Lack of imagination?) to listen to a good fairy tale, I thought to myself

Now, many years later, I’ve dug out the same story and am putting it on the Foxtrot Squadron Forum for your reading pleasure. I hope it won't be lack of imagination this time round!

The one-minute story, which robbed me of my DS grading went like this:

Tickling Toes

I was never good at telling bedtime stories when putting Avina and Karishma to sleep, but it had to be done. So I came up with a novel way of tickling the soles of their feet until they fell off to sleep. However, Avina used to insist on a bedtime story. One night after running through my repertoire of fairly tales I chose to take the usual frog-turned-prince tale and spin it on its head into a different version.  I don’t recall the exact words I told them, but it went something like this:

 “Once upon a time, in a land far away, an independent, self-assured but average-looking princess happened upon a frog as she sat, contemplating ecological issues, on the shore of an unpolluted pond in a verdant meadow near her castle, nestled in the salubrious summer climate of North Germany.

The frog hopped into the princess’s lap and said. “Elegant lady, I was once a handsome prince, until an evil witch cast a spell upon me. One kiss from you, however, and I will turn back into the dapper young prince that I am. And then my sweet, we can marry and set up house-keeping in my castle with my mother, where you can prepare my meals, clean my clothes, bear my children, look after my aging, grouchy, sometimes cantankerous, violent  and often complaining mother and forever feel grateful and happy doing so.”

That night, as the princess dined sumptuously on a repast of lightly sautéed frog legs seasoned in a white wine with a dab of onion cream sauce, she chuckled and thought to herself: “Yeah right. I don’t think so honey”.

And she lived happily ever after.

By now my sweet child should have fallen asleep and just when I thought I could slip out of bed and carry on, Avina spoke up “Not a nice story, Dad, tell me another one.”

From that day onwards I got back to tickling toes.