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Douglas Abernathy

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Douglas Abernathy was the father of Alec Abernathy, one of our most pre-eminent authors. Alec Abernathy swears to God that the events described in his forthcoming Aardvark Attack! truly happened. He knows this because when he was a child, his father told him so, but I’ll let him explain. - SWT

Those readers who have consulted the 1974 edition of Who’s Who will be aware that my father died when I was just four years old. It was possibly the most traumatic effect of my life – if you discount the death of my mother from an unexpected outbreak of bubonic plague when I was six – but it was not as if I did not get to spend some of the finest years of my life with that great and worthy man, my father. Having learnt to read by the age of two, I wasted no time in ploughing through the dusty scientific journals that littered his study. Occasionally my father would smile to see me sitting underneath his old oak table, surrounded by a pile of bound volumes as high as my shoulders, and would drag me out, together with whichever publication happened to be in my hands at the time, in order to lecture me on everything which the daft-headed authors had left out of their half-written articles.

I always enjoyed those moments, but the best times of all came but irregularly, when my father’s voice took on a more confidential tone, and he would scout round the study to ensure the doors were both locked and mother was nowhere nearby. These were the times when he had a secret to tell, the times when he had been involved in secret deeds and secret adventures, for my father had worked for a secret government research establishment in the Scottish highlands during World War II, and every so often, though he had been sworn to silence by Winston Churchill himself, he would tell me a story of those days.

Why he chose to break his vow in that way I do not know – perhaps he knew, in some strange way, that his time with me would be short, and wanted to make sure I remembered the whole man, not just the side of him that I, as a child, would normally have seen. Perhaps also he worried that I, as an adult, would face similar trials and challenges, and he wanted me to be prepared. In any case, when he died, in 1951, in a test plane over Nova Scotia, I wept, and vowed that if it ever became possible I would honour his memory by recording the events that took place during his years in that Scottish highland base. I write this book in the year 2001, and so the events which I am about to describe have finally emerged from the shadows of the Official Secrets Act. Finally, a whole millennium later, I am able to commend the tales of my father’s courage to the rest of the world.

On this occasion, I had been reading a piece in the Progressive Scientist about some anomalies in animal behaviour that had been recorded by scientists in the year 1942. Dragging me out by my ankles and holding me upside-down, Dr Douglas Abernathy laughed to see that even this could not divert my gaze from the printed text and neatly arranged tables. Shaking me, but having no more success, he lay me out flat on the table and pretended to begin a surgical operation.

“Scalpel!” he called, pushing my fringe away from my face and grabbing a protractor from the desk. “Please make the first incision!” He began to drag the protactor across my forehead as if cuttting a hole, and finally managed to irritate me into paying him some attention.

“What do you want, father?” I asked, swinging my legs over the edge of the table and trying to judge whether jumping off was a feasible option. I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t – yet – and reluctantly caught his eye.

“Oh,” he sighed, “nothing much, just larking around. Not a lot going on today...”

“But father,” I scolded, “you are the finest doctor in all of Edinburgh! There must be a million operations waiting for your attention!”

“Well, that’s all true,” he said, plucking the reading matter from my unaware hands. Unsuccessfully, I tried to snatch it back – he raised an eyebrow at the break in my usual composure. “But I’ve done all the most important ones, like fixing the King of Spain’s broken elbow, and mending the tail of the cowardly lion, and so they sent me home.”

I pushed my tiny round spectacles back up my nose and gave him one of my sternest looks. “There is no cowardly lion, it’s just a book.”

“Oh, is that true?” said my father, with a look of surprise. “No wonder that fellow got angry when I sewed a tail onto him!” I could not help laughing. “I suppose you’ll be telling me next that the King of Spain doesn’t have ankles?”

I shrugged, and started to look around for a means of escape. Father threw an eye over the journal I had been reading, and burst out laughing. I must have looked hurt, because he patted me on the shoulder.

“Oh, it’s not you, Alexander, it’s this article. The bald-faced buffoons have missed the whole point!”

“I thought it very well-written and properly argued.” I was a very well-spoken three year-old, as you may have noticed.

“And so it is,” said father, “so it is. The problem is that they were not in full possession of the facts when they set pen to paper. I know all about the anomalies which they have spotted. But what they have only discovered now following years of statistical analysis, I learnt when the head of the British army telephoned me to discuss it.”

“Really, father?”

“It’s absolutely true,” he replied, which means, for those people who never met Dr Douglas Abernathy, that it was, because he never told a lie in his life. This entire story is true, and anyone who says otherwise is a fool or a liar, and in all likelihood both. “And this is how it happened...”

I intend to tell his story in my first novel, Aardvark Attack. – Alec Abernathy