Chameleon

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Caleb Jackson’s book ‘Chameleon’ is a riot of international from his birth in the dying Indian Raj, childhood on the Thames, apprenticeship in the Glasgow shipyards and on an oil tanker, he finds his métier as a Civil Engineer.
The Victoria Line tunnels, a deepwater berth in the Scottish Highlands, roads and bridges around the world are backdrop to the comic masochism, which is the common thread of this galloping narrative.
Rites of passage are more Bernard Manning than Bernard Cornwell, but the memoir is peopled with characters of such diversity as to make it hilarious and reflective, sacred and profane, ribald and rhythmic.
Poverty is the spur impelling him and his growing family to Scotland and thence to the Welsh Borderland, where he puts down roots only to be driven abroad by the slump of the 1970’s.
In Borneo, he survives a Malay curse, dines on wild pork with humiliation as dessert in a jungle mosque. He pitches a tent in tiger-infested forest, encounters the elusive orang utan, gets bitten by a giant centipede, whilst his family blow the dying embers of colonial life in the mansion made famous by Agnes Keith in ‘Land Below the Wind’.
In Bahrein, he takes tea with the Sheikh whose guests include Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan.
Fulanis, Hausas, Ibos and Yorubas enliven his bachelor contract in Nigeria where regular power and water cuts, petrol shortage, burglaries and public executions lighten his darkness.
Maintaining his home in England, he returns broke from his travels to start his own business.
Back in the Welsh Borders, he encounters some bizarre a Countess whose pub floods every winter, a gypsy selling a building he doesn’t own, a Russian émigré whose house is struck by lightning, a Scientist growing mushrooms from the walls of his Malvern home.
Eccentrics and bawds, rogues and reprobates entwine their lives around subsidence, dry rot, leaking drains. Law courts and squash courts, senile dementia and atrial fibrillation litter the tale.
Judges, Farmers, Lawyers, Builders and Surveyors, Insurance Loss Adjusters and Architects, a Squire displaced from the 19th century attend this tale of dilapidation – of buildings and of people.
There is a womanising shepherd, who thwarts an IRA execution squad, only to be arrested at the London Eye for carrying his castrating knife.
A charge of manslaughter brings the Jacksons to court and wrongful identification makes for tension as suspicion of murder and kidnapping falls on the author.
Amusing anecdotes, jokes and poems jostle with madness, suicide and attempted murder.
Drought, flood, tempest, subsidence, earthquake, sudden death, everything bar famine and pestilence are sketched in Caleb Jackson’s broad canvas of bar-room ballads, travelogue, post Imperial history, self-help manual and contemporary non-political commentary.