This is a nostalgic short story for me about not eggs but yams. Mine and my sister’s Mom ‘n’ Dad read to us as kids from books (they also made up genuinely good stories from their heads which we demanded as preference these are things I feel lucky (not Lucky) about). Soma the best wackiest books came from carboot sales (no LRB-franchise Aquila Magazine does the Anarchist Review of Books have a youth arm?). Eleven years ago the Malcom X Elders in Bristol staged ‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’ alongside other Caribbean folk yarns at acta Theatre. I can’t work out who Pat Thomson is but she * MIGHT * be a badass education academic now? ‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’ was in The Puffin Book of Five Minute Stories (1998) I remember it strangely often for its totally addictive rhythm. In ‘Ticky Picky Boom Boom’, a hoard of yams keep chasing “Mr Tiger” under the spell of “Ananse the Trickster” (Anansi a folk-spider creative and cunning and wealthy and not very nice). “Mr Tiger” cannot escape the possessed yams even with the help of “Mr Dog”, “Sister Duck”, and “Mr Goat”. Répéter répéter again and again ~
And down the road came the yams and the noise their feet made sounded like this: Ticky Picky Boom Boom
Ticky Picky Boom Boom
Ticky Picky Boom Boom bouf!
The nice guys win though, yay, and all the yams get eaten E a t t h e R i c h. It reminds me of J. G. Ballard’s novella Running Wild (1988), where murderous children from posho Pangbourne prevail (but in a kind-of reversal of that plot).
Included in The Puffin Book of Five Minute Stories, Puffin Books, 1998
A Personal Anthology 