“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From
the fiends, that plague thee thus! –
Why looks’t thou so?” With my
cross-bow
I
shot the ALBATROSS. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Captain Love was an ageless
mariner, a pirate in gothic black, high, pointed collar and sharp, angled
features to the face and beard. He stood
alone, pre-dawn on an outcrop of rock, indifferent to the storm that raged all
about. Bertie conceived him thus, corrupting
his mother’s morality tales, before he could properly draw the character. It then took an age of effort, retreating
from the world and neglecting the distractions of youth, before Bertie had
refined his skill, this time twisting the romantic art of his father.
When he was ready, however, it
all felt worthwhile, like a brilliant dawn following the blackest of
nights. With this arrival of day Bertie
sketched the deliberate detail he had learned, charcoal moving with pace and
precision. It soon became clear what the
captain was holding in his right hand, the head of a black yo-yo caught
mid-motion returning from a throw. After
that Bertie drew the left hand, depicting cruelty without fear; what he
produced was the white neck of a once graceful sea-bird, hanging limp and red
drops of blood inked as they fell.
This, as Bertie would describe,
was an ordinary tale of colour, black against white against red. There was no guilt involved, no fiends
plaguing his conscience; and it was the very simplicity that shocked,
anticipating his audience and knowing what they would want to hate to see. Bertie did so by pocketing the captain’s
yo-yo like a fob, the sketch complete.
He followed this with new images, the long fingers of Captain Love
piercing innocent albatross skin and picking out raw, bloodied flesh to eat.
Mrs Anderson, for whom
Bellcastle, like the Junior School she ran, was an ordered idyll, never quite
understood Bertie’s work. She was
pleased that her only child had discovered some talent, a focus for an
otherwise idle life; yet the skill of disgusting an audience, causing them to
cringe at the offence displayed, was not one that she admired, and Mrs Anderson
would have preferred if Bertie had applied himself in some different way.
Bertie stuck to his art
nonetheless, the son of a small-town Headmistress rescued from the
embarrassment of obedience by the shocks he administered. Added to this growing notoriety among the
local young were those rewards that a modest income can provide. Whilst the Captain Love franchise would never
reach a mainstream audience – the cruelties depicted a niche market, the tales
of the captain attracted a steady, loyal following. This meant that by the time Bertie reached
his late teens, conscious that there was a world beyond his predictable and
comfortable Anderson home, the sale of Captain Love stories was sufficient to
finance the purchase of Bertie’s car.
