The Ox Is Slow

The Ox Is Slow

This is a tale of two families and it is here where the similarity ends.

From the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the Belmont family culture had been based on military leadership, with its aristocratic identity conventions.

In 1830, Pierre Belmont was acting as a military advisor to the French court of King Louis Phillippe. Satisfied with their lifestyles, he could envisage no serious alteration to his and his family’s way of life.

At that time, John Marshall and his wife Caroline were living in England, near a small Norfolk village named Walpole St. Peter. Born into poverty, John was an itinerant farm labourer, unable to read or write, with only a basic understanding of arithmetic.

He, like Pierre Belmont, could see no reasons for his or Caroline’s existence to change or improve.

But, eleven centuries before, an ancient Phoenician proverb began to sew the threads of a human fabric that would have been beyond the imagination of both these men.

It was known as the Y Aphorism.

Born in Poplar, London, in 1929, Robert Putt was evacuated from there in September 1939 and in his absence his family home was destroyed by enemy bombing in August 1940. Returning to London in September 1940, he rejoined his family in South Woodford, where, in July 1944, a V1 flying bomb found them again. Thankfully, the family survived these ordeals.

From the ages of 11 to 14, he attended a Secondary School at Woodford Green until December 1943, when he became employed by a London Stockbroker as a junior clerk/messenger. At the age of 18, he was called into the British Army under the National Service Act in 1947 and served most of this time in Trieste, Italy, returning to the UK in 1950. In May of that year, he found the girl of his dreams and they were married December 1952. They celebrated their 70^th Wedding Anniversary in December 2022.

He spent most of his working life with a U.S. multinational telecommunications company, retiring from this in September 1991 at the age of 62. Since then, he carried out voluntary work for local charities and civil/government organisations over a period of ten years, but is now fully retired, finding comfort and satisfaction from the company of his wife and the added pleasures of gardening and DIY activities, eventually leading to an interest in writing children’s short stories and poetry, directed mainly at his grandchildren. This eventually leading to more ambitious undertakings, the latest of these being The Ox Is Slow.

With no professional or scholarly education to fall back on, his efforts are purely related to a love of the English language. This venture took four years to put together and it is his wish that the story delivers some satisfaction with anyone who decides to read it. In Robert’s words, writing it has provided him with an experience that has been quite like no other, touching almost every sensation his lifetime has given him.