by Mike Bateman
An introuduction

I am the child of two restless hearts, gypsies spirits caught up in gray suited mainstream ambition. My father tells me that we are descended from the last king of Burma, but for the most part are English and Irish. I was born in Bombay, in the then colony of India 1943, by the time I was five we had left for Scotland. It was there in grade one, although I have no recollection and will have to take my mother's word for it, that I learned to play chess at St. Michael's catholic school in the Clyde. I find it strange not to have any memory of learning to play chess, since I can remember my first steps in life, the time in Burma they were going to kill my father. The holy man's hut in the lake where we swam, going to school at two, and so many unimportant and trivial occurrences, that I am at a loss to understand why such an important part of my life is forgotten, unless for some reason my frail subconscious wanted to shield me from this devilish game.

When I was seventeen or thereabouts, my friend Wayne and I stood alone on the black stone beach of Hirsch Creek. He carried a 3030 Winchester lever action, the kind you see in all the cowboy movies, and I a Lee - Enfield Sears Special.

"Have you ever seen a bullet coming at you?", he asked. His voice carried clearly over the forty or so feet between us, and over the thunder of the rapids.

"No", I replied. He cracked one from the hip. There was no flash, as the bullet slowly emerged from the muzzle. Then it suddenly disappeared over my head, parting my hair as it passed.

"Well?", he said with a smile.

I made him dance all the way back into the thick brush that lined the bank. I can still hear him laughing.

In my youth I never thought I'd live long enough to take up chess, never mind one day become the Northern British Columbia Closed Chess Champion. A one time Governor of the Canadian Federation of Chess, and editor of the Northern Chess Letter . If someone had told me I would be a chess journalist, a writer of short stories and poems, better duck those were fighting words.

Chess players are not born chess players, although, most people think that's all they can or will do. The history of chess is not just the records or the score sheets. Chess is nothing, without the human tragedy and triumph.

In the theory of Chaos, little things mean a lot. Jack Fossum was as I remember, a tall man. He was slim yet strongly built, an x-mountie who had a gift for writing, and while he would later become an author, at that time from 1963 to 1970, he was the editor of the plant news paper, the INGOT . The two of us stood in one of those kaleidoscope hallways, the kind that turns a different corner, becomes a room through time.

"Why don't you write a chess column for the INGOT? ", he said casually, and so this off hand remark, like the hallway in retrospect reached a new proportion. You might say I attribute my career in chess solely to one man, one moment, one flicker of time that is unrepeatable, and you might be right. How many of our unfulfilled possibilities have passed by like unmade moves considered only by God.

Here without further ado: The Devil Takes Postal Chess

 

 

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Copyright © 1983, 1999 by Mike Bateman.

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