 |
 |
Who Let Off? ‘Did you let off?’ That’s what we boys would ask in class when a whiff of flatulence spread from someone’s short pants and merged with the pong - our roomful of teenage bodies in after lunch and a sweating half-hour chasing a ball over short-trimmed grass, or bouncing ball in the fives-courts. Flatulence? we didn’t know the word, nor do I recall the word fart at school. Some genteel inhibition from home censored the word. Dad, if he thought his fart had been overheard, muttered Pardon. A burp, and you’d hear Excuse me. Aunt Maria would say: eating that, dear, would only bring on wind. Yet, at school a prolonged burp was a comic accomplishment provoking rival attempts and claims to be champion. Before lunch, our room’s acoustics had us all over-hearing someone’s tummy-rumbling. How long till lunch-break, sir? Few of us had wrist-watches. Not till serving in the Army - eighteen-year-old conscripts - did I hear, after lights-out in our long dormitory sheds of parallel grey-blanketed beds, the art of prolonged farting. Who let off? someone with brothers or years away at school, boarding. I’m lying here in the dark room by my wife. Her quiet exhalation says she’s asleep; the dogs on their beds just beyond ours are quiet. Can I quietly let off? or if on her next inhalation a whiff from me reaches her, can I shift the blame to a dog, and be let off?