Chapter One: In Which Ralph the Timid resolves to seek a purpose

In every walk of life, there is some force which is omnipotent. For some, this is an old man who sits in the clouds and casts lightning bolts at wrongdoers. Others have a slightly less anthropomorphic view of God, but the general idea is the same - He created everything, and He is In Charge. There are many incarnations of this force, depending on religion. God, Allah, Buddha, the many and varied Gods of the Hindus. For others, there's science. This doesn't necessarily mean L. Ron Hubbard and jumping on couches. There is a long standing precedent for this sort of behaviour. We can look back about two and half thousand years and see that then, in what goes by the general catch-all of "Ancient Greece", a chap in a sheet called Pythagoras was teaching people that vegetarianism was the way but that beans were evil, and going about discussing the power of Mathematics in an exclamatory fashion, and designing sacred triangles.

The point of this is simple. In every life, there is some power that designates that person's journey. It may be as simple as knowing that since you are a Sagittarius, you must love travel, and that whenever Mars is in the third house - whatever that means - you will go and sleep outside because if you don't, you will accidentally eat your partner. Life is full of strange moments. Having established this, we will now turn to the life of Ralph the Timid.

Dismiss from your mind all thoughts of God, Scientology and the Zodiac, because our hero lived a long time ago, in a land far away, where such things had not been invented. In these times, in the land of Ablet, the omnipotent force which gave a person their purpose was given to them by the hour and date of their birth. For example, a baby born in the year of the lesser spotted Cranefly, on a rainy evening in summer just before dinner time would grow up to be inconspicious, quick to tears, always hungry and would usually snore loudly. They would probably grow up and take a up a career in hermiting or chefing. By contrast, a baby born in the year of wolf on a clear morning in spring would be swift of foot, have extremely good eyesight, be ferocious on the field of battle, a loyal friend and altogether an excellent warrior and hunter.

This system was all well and good - especially for soothsayers, chartmakers and midwives, all of whom could make excellent money helping children to be born on auspicious dates - but did have one flaw. If perchance one was born and the date and time of one's birth was not recorded - who could tell what sort of person one was meant to be? It would be a horrible dilemma. Such an individual would wander vaguely through the world searching blindly til they died. For this reason, orphans and abandoned babies were usually abandoned with a chart - not even absconding or dying parents were that cruel - and if they weren't, the good samaritans who took them in were not above making one up. This, if reasonably accurate, worked well enough.

It should not be hard to see what this is leading up to. It leads to our hero, Ralph, sitting on the branch of an apple tree, casually snacking on the crisp fruit and ignoring the calls of his foster mother who wants him to come and mind the baby. Ralph was, as you may have suspected, one of these unfortunate children. He was found, as so often is the case in such stories, wandering alone in the woods by a passing woodcutter. The woodcutter and his fellow clansmen searched high and low but found no trace of either a relative of the toddler or a chart to say what kind of person he would grow up to be.

After a small moment of doubt - after all, the child could have been born in the year of snake under the red moon on a dark and stormy night in winter and everyone knew what happened in those cases - the woodcutter, a nice burly man called Harold, and his plump but overbearing wife Beryl took young Ralph home to live with them and their growing brood of children. They stopped off at the chartmaker's elaborate mansion on the way home and asked him to create, as accurately as possible, a chart and purpose for the child.

The chartmaker, a pleasant enough if somewhat cynical chap, peered into Ralph's face, tickling his chubby nose with his long, spidery beard, and pronounced that he must have been born two years previous, in the year of the earthworm, in spring, on a nice morning just after breakfast. Thus Ralph would grow up to be shy and retiring, yet always cheerful and wanting his lunch. Thus Ralph attained his last name - the Timid - and Harold and Beryl returned home, relieved that they would not be harbouring a potential lunatic.

It soon became evident, however, that the chartmaker had been slightly off in designating Ralph as an earthworm, as shy and retiring Ralph most certainly was not. He was always ready for an adventure with one of his foster brothers, and spent his childhood scampering around the village annoying old people, or climbing trees in the forest - always trying to go higher and faster and further than the others. Fortunately, the chartmaker had been right in other respects - Ralph was certainly of a cheerful dispostion, which was lucky. For as Ralph grew, and learned the importance of the birth chart to his future prospects, he realised, along with everyone else, that his was clearly wrong. A boy of a less optimistic outlook could have fallen into despondency and possibly into the deepest part of the nearby lake, but Ralph was not like that. Instead, he resolved to wait till he was older, and then go out and seek anyone who could tell him who he was meant to be. Having resolved this, he put it from his mind until such time that he was able to do something about it.

Which brings us back to the apple tree. Ralph finished his apple and contemplated. He was approximately eighteen years old, and his older foster brothers had gone off into their various professions. He was the oldest of the remaining children, and while he had many useful skills - he could run, climb, swim, wield an axe as well as his foster father, cook as well as his mother, and was good at riddles - he had no idea what he was meant to do with his life. If he had been the spring morning earthworm he was meant to be, he would have gone happily to be apprentice to the chartmaker. But he was not, and he could not think of anything worse than being trapped inside all day. He wanted to be out doing things. He wanted to have adventures. He was also aware of the fact that it was time - past time, even - that he left home. His parents could not be expected to look after him forever.

He could hear the rising note in his foster mothers voice now, and deciding it was time to give in and go and help with the baby - he'd finished his apple anyway - Ralph swung down from the tree and ran towards the house. He wondered, as he went, how Beryl and Harold would take the news. Ralph the Timid had come to a decision - it was time for him to leave home and go out into the wider world of Ablet. Ralph the Timid was going to seek his purpose.


[Word count so far: 1281]