The Wind Beneath His Wings

(Being a True and Largely Accurate Account of Harold Pumpernickel of Whifflington)

Harold Pumpernickel was eighty-four years old, five feet three inches tall, and, as his late wife Doris had once observed, “built like a potato that’s given up.”

He lived alone at 4 Brassica Terrace, Whifflington, a town so unremarkable that its Wikipedia page had been edited only once, by a man who later deleted it and moved to Swindon.

Harold had a gift. Not the sort of gift you might wrap in paper. More the sort you find left on a park bench.

He farted.

Loudly. Freely. With the serene confidence of a man who has decided that the world owes him something and this is the repayment schedule.

It had begun, so Harold maintained, after his seventy-eighth birthday, when he had eaten an entire pot of his daughter’s lentil soup on a dare from nobody in particular. Something had shifted inside him that day. A valve, perhaps. A principle. Whatever it was, it had never shifted back.

The sounds he produced were, meteorologically speaking, remarkable. There were low, rolling efforts that recalled distant thunder over Shropshire. There were sharp, percussive reports that caused pigeons to vacate rooftops at considerable speed. And, on special occasions, there were the long, meditative ones — the kind that appeared to have chapters.

Whifflington had adapted. The post office kept a window open. The library had quietly reclassified him as a weather event. Mrs. Goggins at the bakery had started timing her oven extractions to coincide with his visits so that nobody could prove anything.

It was on a Tuesday. Tuesdays being Whifflington’s designated day for things going wrong. It was a Tuesday that Harold attended the monthly meeting of Whifflington District Council.

He had a complaint. The council had replaced the bench outside the library with a “heritage interpretation panel” explaining that a bench had once stood there. Harold took this personally.

He put on his good cardigan. He combed his remaining hair, both of them. He set off. Please note, he did consume a cheese and piccalilli sandwich to keep his strength.

The public gallery of Whifflington Council Chamber was a room designed to discourage democracy. Twelve plastic seats faced a glass partition, beyond which nine councillors sat at a horseshoe table looking, collectively, like a jury that had already decided.

Harold took a seat in the front row. He was flanked by Mrs. Donatella Fridge, 71, who had come about the parking, and Mr. Terence Plonk, 58, who was not entirely sure why he had come but felt it was probably important.

Councillor Yvette Crump, the Chair, was speaking. She was a woman of tremendous municipal dignity — the kind who laminated things for pleasure.

“…and the Heritage Streetscape Initiative,” she announced, “Has been unanimously well received by the community—”

It happened.

PPPPPPPFFFFFFPPPPPFFFFFTTTTT!!

It was, even by Harold’s standards, a statement. A full, resonant, two-beat declaration, like a bassoon clearing its throat before a symphony. The acoustic properties of the council chamber, it turned out, were excellent. The glass partition, vibrated. A glass of water on the councillors’ table developed a small, concerned ripple.

Nine councillors looked up.

Twelve members of the public looked sideways. Some had new hair styles as a result of the blast of wind.

Harold looked straight ahead with the expression of a man studying a particularly interesting patch of ceiling.

Councillor Crump blinked. “As I was— the Heritage—”

It happened again.

PPPPFFFTTTSQUARKFFFFTTT!!

This one was different in character. More exploratory. The kind of sound, Mrs. Fridge would later tell her sister, that you didn’t so much hear as experience.

Mr. Plonk, who had been taking notes for reasons he still couldn’t explain, stopped writing. He looked at his pen. He looked at Harold. He wrote: (unclear) and underlined it.

Councillor Derek Flunge, who represented the North Ward and had a complicated relationship with decorum, made a sound that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. This caused his neighbour, Councillor Patricia Boon, to press her pen very hard into her notepad and concentrate ferociously on the agenda.

“Right,” said Councillor Crump, with the composure of someone diffusing a bomb in a hat.

“Any— any matters from the public gallery before we proceed?”

Harold raised his hand.

“The bench,” he said.

“The— yes?”

“You’ve taken away my bench and put up a board about a bench. That’s not the same thing as a bench. A board doesn’t support your—” he paused.

Something was happening, structurally.

“Your lumbar,” he concluded, with some effort.

What accompanied the word lumbar is not, perhaps, best described in a formal document. Suffice to say that Councillor Flunge was now openly weeping with suppressed laughter, his shoulders performing a private earthquake. The glass partition had developed a kind of soft resonance, like a singing bowl.

Mrs. Fridge had produced a small lavender sachet from her handbag and was holding it beneath her nose with the composure of a Victorian lady at the Front.

Councillor Crump straightened her lapels. She had chaired meetings through flooding, a mouse, and the Great Projector Incident of 2019. She was not to be undone.

“The matter of the bench will be referred to the Streetscape Sub-Committee, who will consider the possibility of— of supplementary seating provision.”

She spoke in a voice like a ruled line. Harold nodded. This seemed satisfactory.He stood. He buttoned his cardigan. He turned to leave.

What occurred as he navigated the narrow row of plastic seats was, all present agreed, the most sustained contribution to local democracy Whifflington had witnessed in forty years of meetings.

It lasted approximately four seconds.

It appeared to have two distinct movements.

PFFFTTTTT!! SQUEEELLLLSHHH!!

Councillor Flunge had to be taken outside.

Harold walked home along the High Street, past the library and its interpretation panel, into the thin October air. He paused where his bench had been. He stood there a moment in the mild quiet of Whifflington.

Then, softly, contemplatively, like a man at one with himself and with the universe and with every molecule of last night’s cauliflower cheese—

he offered his thoughts to the afternoon.

PAAAAAAAARRRRRPPPP!!

A pigeon left a rooftop. In a hurry. 

Harold went home for his tea.

The End.