The Memoir of a Groucho Marxist: A Very British Fairy Tale

On September 16, 1951, Darryl Michael Vincent, a fairy boy-child, fell out of a badger hole in Midford Woods. He grew up in a prefabricated house with his mother, Doreen, his father, Stanley, and a red butterfly called Karl Marx. He was born six years after World War II ended and the City of Bath in the West Country of England was still pockmarked with bombsites, the people bruised by the death of loved ones. Amidst the rubble, ration books, and despair, the fairy boy-child attempted to fit in. It soon became clear that Darryl Michael Vincent was not a regular boy-child. There was something different about him. Very, very, different. He was a Groucho Marxist. As a Groucho Marxist, formal education was wasted on him. And so, Darryl Michael Vincent was educated in Midford Woods by fairies, the souls of homosexuals long gone from this mortal Earth. He opened books, dived into well-thumbed pages, and swam in a soup of words. In this woodland school, helped by psilocybin mushrooms and opium, he was taught by Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke, and other occupants of Midford Woods. Most important of all, Darryl Michael Vincent dipped the ruling class into bowls of custard and left them on the train track for the porcupine waitresses to laugh at.