A Street in Wigston Magna 1944 


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A Street in Wigston Magna 1944



Whistler, George Bernard Shaw and Wilde himself are just a few of the notables present. Inevitably, it is Oscar Wilde that the party centres around. Raising his glass of champagne, the Prince speaks to his host.

'My congratulations, Wilde. Your play is a great success. The whole of London is talking about you.'

The group waits expectantly for the master of the paradox to be paradoxical. Wilde does not disappoint them.

'There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.'

For a full minute laughter reverberates around the room. Whistler turns puce with envy. Shaw twitches with jealousy. Aubrey Beardsley micturates in pique. Max Beerbohm stuffs a sour grape up his nostril and Jane Austen revolves in her grave.

The Prince claps Oscar on the shoulder. 'Very witty. Very, very witty.'

The game is afoot. Whistler takes a breath and ripostes:

'There is only one thing worse in the world than being witty and that is not being witty.'

It is a hit. The room rocks with laughter for another full minute. Oscar Wilde's face goes as green as his carnation. Shaw winces. Beardsley, feeling a pang of resentment, defecates in a riding boot. Beerbohm enviously punches a hole in a Chinese silk screen, and Jane Austen's false breast falls off. Wilde opines.

'I wish I had said that.'

Whistler smiles at him. He had expected that incisive retort and is ready for it.

'You will, Oscar. You will.'

Wilde waves an effete hand in the direction of Whistler.

'Your Highness, do you know James McNeill Whistler?'

Ducking the effete hand, the Prince declares, 'Yes, we play squash together.'

Wilde is in like a rapier.

'There is only one thing worse than playing squash together and that is playing it by yourself.'

He waits expectantly for the roars of laughter and the shrieks of glee. They do not come. The silence grows longer.

So does Shaw's beard. Eventually, Oscar mutters, 'I wish I hadn't said that.'

Seeing his bosom friend with egg on his face, Whistler cannot resist the temptation to throw an omelette.

' You did, Oscar. You did.'

The room rocks with laughter. Exhausted with the excellence of the wit and the gay bonhomie, the Prince bids his host farewell.

'You must forgive me Wilde, but I must get back up the Palace.'

Wilde is desperate. It's unheard of. The Prince of Wales leaving with a smile on his face that had not been put there by Oscar Wilde. He blurts:

'Your Majesty, you are like a big jam doughnut with cream on top.'

A shocked hush descends on the room. The Prince of Wales, like his mother on a previous occasion, is not amused.

'I beg your pardon.' Wilde splutters, completely at a loss. 'Er... er... er... er... it was one of Whistler's.'

The game is now not merely afoot. It's putting the boot in.

'I didn't say that.'

'You did, James, you did.'

The Prince of Wales and the assembled company gaze expectantly at Whistler. For a moment the celebrated painter is at a loss, and then...

'I meant that, like a doughnut, your arrival gives us pleasure, and your departure makes us hungry for more.'

Loud laughter and applause follow this elegant explanation. Encouraged, Whistler moves onto the attack.

'Your Majesty is like a stream of bat's piss.'

Over the gasps, the Prince of Wales thunders.

'I beg your pardon?'

Coolly the painter gazes at the Prince. 'It was one of Wilde's.'

How will the hero of a thousand cul-de-sacs cope with this one? The gathering does not have to wait long for an answer. The mind that has been sharpened to a sword's edge through years of verbal fencing rises brilliantly to the occasion.

'It sodding well wasn't. It was one of Shaw's.'

Bernard Shaw totters visibly as the buck that has been passed to him hangs heavily round his neck. But this is the man destined to write Arms and the Man and its astonishing sequel, Armpits and the Woman. Smiling at the Prince, he speaks softly.

'I merely meant, Your Majesty, that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.'

There is a ripple of awed admiration. The ease with which Shaw has escaped from the sinking ship has been remarkable.

Shaw has been put on his mettle by a fellow Irishman and to Shaw a fellow Irishman is fair game. He gives Wilde a wicked look, then coolly drops the doyen of distinguished society in the ordure.

'Your Majesty is like a dose of clap/

There is a collective gasp of horror. The horror becomes near panic, when Shaw, not waiting for the Prince's superb rejoinder of: 'I beg your pardon?' continues, 'Before you arrive is pleasure, but after a pain in the dong.'

The Prince of Wales pales in anger, and, as there is a lot of him, there's a lot of pale.

'What!!!'he shrieks.

Then Shaw plays his master card.

'It was one of Wilde's.'

Every eye in the room looks at Oscar Wilde, including the blood-shot pair belonging to the Prince of Wales.

'I'm waiting, Wilde. I'm waiting....'

New York, 1976. The City Centre Theatre. A packed house. Monty Python's Flying Circus is appearing. We are in mid-sketch. Whistler is being played by John Cleese. Shaw is being played by Michael Palin. The Prince of Wales is being played by Terry Jones. I am playing Oscar Wilde. And I have just dried. I cannot remember the next line. The entire theatre waits. And, as they wait, so do I for that damned line to enter my head. It refuses to come but many other pieces of the past do....

Hampstead, 1968. (Actually Belsize Park 1969, but Hamp-stead sounds better, and God knows why I bothered to lie about it being 1968, it's so pointless, isn't it?) Somewhere in

NW3 in the latter half of the twentieth century, when everyone was being either homosexual, black, or a drug addict, and a compulsory part of the English course at Warwick University was sleeping with Germaine Greer - whose grading system ran from 'First Class, with Distinction' to 'You Weren't Going to Do It with THAT, were you?' - I first started to have trouble with embedded relative clauses. To describe this period I personally invented the word 'trendy'. (This is not the same word 'trendy' which had been in common parlance for yonks, but an entirely new word which actually means the same thing.) This new word 'trendy' was pronounced with extra emphasis on the 'N', though it was considered 'untrendy' (another of my linguistic inventions designed to replace the obsolete word 'untrendy', but carrying the same meaning) to make this slight shift of emphasis apparent and so no one actually pronounced it this way at all and only two close friends and John Lennon1 were aware of the profound change I had perpetrated in the etymological fabric of the English Language. Many other words coined by myself were often to be heard in use at parties of the period, such as this one which took place in a large room somewhere in Belsize Park....

A liquid light show is being projected onto the rear half of a giraffe which is protruding through the wall opposite the door. Everyone is shouting at everyone else in an attempt to make themselves heard over the ear-shattering noise of a fashionably unknown group.

'Excuse me,' I say, trying to push my way to the bar past a person trying to look casual whilst wearing a glittering codpiece and an albino cobra wound round his neck. His

i. It may seem that I am merely dropping names here and in fact I am. I've never met John Lennon in my life. But who needs him when you have been raised in the same street as people like Nilsson, H.; Starr, R.; Harrison, G.;John, E.; Floyd, Pink; Zeppelin, Led; Moon, K.; Johns, Capt. WE (Retd.); Bowie, D.; Clarke, Pet; Arabia, Lawrence of; Shankar, Ravi; Menuhin, Yehudi; West, Mae; Distel, S.; Ali, M.; Mother, H.R.H. The Queen; Durrells, L. and G.; Fields, Gracie; Coward, N., and seventeen Nobel prizewinners? But see D. Niven's, The Moon is a Baboon, where he tries to avoid the charge of name-dropping by a rather clumsy pretence at humility: 'I just happened to know them....' Cut it out, Dave. When it's time for grovelling leave it to the expert.

fluorescent face seems to be painted like a Coca Cola tin, and it's impossible not to notice that he is wearing a pale green palette rinse.

That's nice,' I say.

Thanks,' he trendily replies.

'Is the bar over there?'

'Oh how orgasmic darlingarama-ette, what a divinely hairy chest.'

Thanks. Nice to talk to you.'

'I wonder when Roy Orbison will die?'

'Quite.'

At this point a man wearing a suit made entirely of wood is wheeled over my toe, and I look around to find David and see that he's stuck talking to a group of people dressed entirely in leather, except for their spectacles which are made of glass and leather. He seems happily occupied so I continue to hunt for a drink. Someone shouts—

'For Christ's sake, Beryl, stop necking with that dog.'

'But it's an Alsatian...'

'So?'

I suddenly spot a gin bottle, but the space between me and it is largely occupied by a forty-stone negress wearing a linnet feather, who screams,

This place ain't cool enough1 for me, man, I'm going.'

At this point she shoots herself through the left temple with a rather nice Alan Aldridge-designed derringer. There is a chorus of, 'Bye darling!'

'But she shot herself,' a novice screams.

'Hype down Clovissa.'

The gin bottle is now streaming with fresh warm blood and there is a piece of frontal lobe lodged in the only available glass. I remember my medical training and leave.

Very few seconds later, David and I are outside. It's a warm

I. 'Enough': Zambian pronunciation, popular in Hampstead at this time, of the name Enoch, here referring to Enoch Blomqvist. The word 'Blomqvist' was currently very much in vogue amongst Icelandic apiarists and carried the meaning 'sufficiency in quantity of. It was commonly used in phrases such as 'Just one of you little buggers sting me again and I'll napalm the lot of you. I've had quite blomqvist of it, do you hear?'

summer evening, the moon is beaming, the streets are empty, the odours of rose bay willow herb, night-scented stock and dogshit vie with each other to find soft purchase on our nasal membranes, here in Belsize Avenue. Everything is calm and peaceful.

We are happily walking down the street when our path is partly obstructed by a large peony bush that hangs over it from behind someone's garden fence. I push the low hanging bush away with just a hint of irritation.

'Don't be so rough, they're pretty...'

'What are?'

'The peonies,' says David, picking one. 'Look...'

Instantly a police siren wails and there is a screech of brakes with dust flying everywhere as a police-car slams to a halt beside us and two policemen leap out. One of them, the brains of the outfit, grabs the peony from David and says,

'What's this then?'

'A peony,' I say.

'Oh you admit that then?'

The second policeman is already beginning to write in his notebook.

'Admit? But look, officer...'

'Don't try to flatter me, you won't get out of it that way.'

'Get out of what?' (Exasperation creeping in.)

'Calm down,' says the larger policeman with the notebook.

'Look, please, what am I supposed to have done?'

'Not you, him,' pointing at David. 'He's committed a felony.'

I am beginning to get irritated. 'What do you mean?'

'Theft. That's what I mean. He has taken away the personal goods of another, viz. one peony...'

'But it's only a flower.'

'Only a flower!' hyperboles the notebooked policeman. 'Ho! Ho!'

'That is Property,' points out his companion (with enough emphasis not to have needed the additional heavy 'Property' from his colleague).

'What do you mean, "Property"?' I said.

'Did that peony just appear out of thin air?'

3i

mm'

'What's this then?'

'No, it came from that bush.'

'That bush eh? Is that bush his?' Pointing at David.

'No.'

'Is it yours?'

'No.'

'Is it the bush of a friend or relation of yours?'

'No.'

'Then it is Another's. Did you ask the permission of Another?' he added, indicating the house to which the bush belonged.

'No.'

'That, my lad, is theft, which is a felony and punishable with up to thirty years imprisonment....'

In my mind's eye, further up the street I see an old lady being beaten up by four thugs and innocent passers-by being attacked and robbed. Several blatant rapes occur, while men wearing black and white hooped sweaters and masks run in and out of houses carrying huge bags marked 'loot'.

'What do you mean? Theft! Felony! He just picked a flower,' I say angrily.

'Stole a flower!'

'All right, then we'll give it back.'

'You can't, lad. It's severed.'

'What do you mean, "severed"?'

'Well, did you intend to put it back?'

'Er, yes, all right, we did.'

'Ho! And how would you do that, sir?'

'Well I think I'd, er...'

'Sellotape? Nail it back? A few well-placed rivets? You couldn't, could you?'

'Well no, I s'pose not.'

'Well there you are. 'Course if you'd taken the whole bush, pulled it up roots and all, we couldn't have proved that you didn't intend to put it back.'

A few streets away a President is being assassinated.

'All right, look, this is ridiculous. I'll buy a whole new bush for them.'

'Well it wouldn't be the same bush, would it?'

The second policeman stops taking notes, in order to 'loom' larger and be in for the kill.

'Look, I'll just go and ask the owner of the house whether he minds our having taken a peony and if he does mind I'll pay him compensation, but of course he won't mind - anyway the thing was obstructing the pavement....'

'Don't try to be clever with us my lad...'

The policeman who has the notebook raises one fist. His colleague pushes it down saying, 'Not yet, not yet,' under his breath. Finally I lose patience.

'Haven't you anything better to do? There are murders going on, arson, rapes and here's two of you just worried over one bloody peony...'

'Oh, so we've got a difficult one here, have we? Sergeant?'

He calls over to the car, out of which leaps a sergeant who strides over.

'Look mate, do you want to come up the station and be "interviewed"?'

'Can be very nasty, being "interviewed"...' adds the man with the notebook.

'Are you threatening violence?' I ask, raising my umbrella slightly to emphasize my point.

'Right, right,' says the sergeant. 'Send for reinforcements.'

At this point the first policeman takes out his radio intercom. 'There's been a peony-severance in Belsize Lane, can we have reinforcements...?'

We walk briskly off leaving them to it. They are far too involved with the due processes of the law to notice. All over London police cars are radioing in to H.Q. with messages like: 'Am proceeding in an easterly direction along North End Avenue towards the scene of a peony-severance on the South side of Belsize Lane....' Sirens screech, men leap out of Black Marias, water cannons are brought out. Questions are asked in Parliament, and then in the Hague. Finally the whole matter cannot be resolved without the kindly intervention of my old friend, Dr Kurt Waldheim from the Jolly Old U.N. Building Here in New York. Pretty neat, don't you think?...

A few doors and a brief time-warp away at the City Centre,

New York 1976, an expectant crowd still waits for the Wil-dean riposte... I am beginning to break out into a sweat. The line just won't come. John Cleese shuffles uncomfortably and mutters, 'Get on with it.'

Thinking this is a prompt I proclaim loudly: 'Get on with it!'

The reaction of the audience gives me the definite impression that this is not my line. It's at moments like this, when one thinks, 'Oh fuck it! Does it all really matter? What are we all here for? Are we predestined to take the paths we follow?' And sure enough, as though to prove a point, I was actually in Los Angeles a year later....

We extinguished our cigarettes and fastened our seat belts, then did it again in French and Spanish, as the first class lounge of the mighty British Airways Boeing 747 banked sharply to the left. Captain Chet Bigglesburg's crisp Oxford drawl slid powerfully through the intercom: 'Listen, yawl. What ho, how are you all, yawl? Anyway, jolly good! We'll be... um, like... sort of landing and things in sort of, yawl, Los Angeles in approximately sort of fifteen minutes from this point-style moment in time, instance-wise, yawl. That is to say landingization will be completed sort of... in a bit... as of now, yawl.... Toodle-pip... sort of... what... oh!' Click. 'Frightfully sorry - yawl.' Click.

The enormous bar glid to a halt and I and my financial adviser, Major Sloane, were ushered from our divans by the by now nude Cypriot debutante air hostess. She offered us our disembarkation executive foot modules, vinylized nylo-nette uppers, hand-stitched onto personalized red-carpetlette soles - a touching modern reminder of a never-existent old-world charm.

In our sixty-foot four-seater Cadillac we executived off downtown for the premiere of Mohammed Ali's film The Greatest, an excellent movie - a damn sight better than Jaws or Saturday Night Fever - which was rejected by black and white audiences alike for simply telling the truth. Or could the distributors have found its portrayal of parasitical white middlemen uncomfortably astute?

The select open-air reception afterwards in the vast Plaza

de los Reaganos drew a huge crowd of spectators, all eager to see the champ arrive stylishly by helicopter. All eyes gazed heavenwards as Mohammed Ali in a typical flamboyant gesture, walked quietly in from the back and mingled with the guests. He was soon spotted by hordes of film, television and press cameramen who would have made personal contact impossible, had he not politely ignored them. Like any decent actor, he simply wanted to know how the film had gone.

As at all film premieres, most people were standing around trying to look as if they knew the star so well that they didn't even need to acknowledge his presence, and merely peered around wondering whether anyone had noticed them. Five people were so famous they didn't even need to turn up, and their vacant spaces were stared at with awe. There was going to be Sammy Davis Jr., and over there would have been Frank Sinatra, if his trichologist hadn't ordered him to sit at home in a chair. The other boxing aficionados were so indescribably famous they had had to hire three separate stadiums to be absent at.

I had never seen so much awe. I left them all to it, and congratulated the man himself on a great performance. He knew that I meant what I had said, and we sat down and chatted for twenty minutes. I found him kind, perceptive and wise and, unlike some who pass for intelligent, capable of listening to others. He must have seen something in me too, otherwise I wouldn't have lasted the full twenty minutes. We talked about religion, black and gay liberation, and the fear that drives man to destroy man - certainly one of the most fascinating conversations in my life. But the gin that had given me the courage to talk to him in the first place also made me completely forget everything that we said. What a wasted opportunity! Sorry everybody, but Major Sloane is trying to arrange a return bout on more equal terms, now that I'm back in training.

I thanked The Greatest, we shook hands, and I walked back into the crowd. My head was buzzing. Everything went beige with little patches of russet. I was aware of a sensation of violent speed as I was crushed by gigantic G forces against the granite steps of the David Niven memorial which seemed

to be hurtling out into the black abyss of space.

'This is no time for musing,' I mused. Suddenly it seemed that a hole had been torn in the very fabric of space. Was I being sucked into a black hole rent in the great doughnut of eternity? 'Don't be silly,' I thought. 'Of course you are.' It was almost as if I was being drawn along a powerful tractor beam towards some unearthly giant star ship. As luck would have it I was.

'Well, well, well, this is a turn up,' I said to myself, thinking, 'What a strange thing to say.' It must have been my upbringing which brought about my following action, for at moments of great stress I always think of bits of people hanging in trees. I threw up. Small bits of tomato skin, sweet corn husks and diced carrot moved out into an elliptical orbit about the sun. There before me was an immense cylindrical structure, oblate in cross section, 92 km. long, 1-92 km. across its longer elliptical axis and 1-56 km. down its shorter elliptical axis. Its further end seemed to be glowing with eerie incandescent power, and the brown, fluted, longitudinal striations made it look for all the world like a lighted Peter Stuy vesant that had just been gently sat on by someone wearing slightly damp corduroy trousers, but twice as sinister. The force beam in which I was trapped was still drawing me and the miniscule portion of what had once been Los Angeles into an entrance bay in what would have been the middle section of the filter tip if it had actually been a cigarette as described and not a bloody great space ship.

As usual in these situations, I now lost consciousness, being overcome with horror at the thought of all the descriptive detail that would otherwise have been needed. Everything went black - absolutely everything. I couldn't see a damn thing but utter blackness until I suddenly woke up out of my extremely well thought-out insensibility, and found myself on the bridge of the star ship, which, as luck would have it, was completely indescribable. I slowly became aware of a strange group of totally unimaginable (my luck was still holding) creatures crowded round a cluster of scanning screens. To my astonishment I saw that they

were watching fictional re-runs from my encounter with puberty (what we doctors refer to as Chapter Two).1

i. This is a rather personal footnote from Graham Chapman addressed in strictest confidence to Alex G. Martin and David J. Sherlock.... It's difficult to pin down, but while there have been some quite interesting passages in this chapter, it all seems a bit disjointed and self-conscious (the footnotes especially). Normally 1 would be the last person to discourage anything 'zany', 'off-the-wall', 'mason-joshing' - call it what you will2 -but in this case I am perturbed. It could be that we aretaking the goodwill of the reader too much for granted. This is supposed to be an autobiography. Given that, how do we explain: (i) No attempt to present a logical time sequence? (li) A whole section shamelessly lifted from a television sketch which was

never performed on stage anyway? (iii) Profitless and unwelcome forays into the realms of science fiction?

'Any fool can gaze at the stars - it takes wit to live in the gutter.'

(Emil Zatopek). (iv) Five authors?

It seems to me that Point (iv) is the cruncher. The time has come to streamline our authorship personnel and allow some of us to leave. To be scrupulously fair I placed all five names in a hat and, blindfold, made a random selection. With some regret, I have to inform you that Douglas Adams, Charles Thing, David A. Yallop and Michael Object, will no longer be with us. But calamity is, as they say, the great-aunt of feeling a bit better after a while, and I hope that you are looking forward as much as I am to a straightforward well written, factual Chapter Two.4

2. Hate 'off-the-wall.' (D.)3

3. I like 'Mason-joshing'. (A.)

4. Yup. (D. and A.)

CHAPTER TWO


Eton

Biggies, Freud And 'How To Speak English In Other Languages'

Summer Term (or 'Wops' as we called it) seemed to have dragged on endlessly. I sat there in a faded deck-chair, gazing dreamily at the shimmering greensward which I had come to Tcnow so well. 'Clop,' came the sound of Clement Attlee Jr. hitting another four. Though only a Prime Minister's son, he'd managed to fit in quite well with some of the other boys, and was regarded as 'simply ozzard' by the Sen. Co. Prae. I suppose that was because he never got 'wazzed',1 although he had gronked most of the lower school with his tadger.

'Clop' - yet another four. I thought of Horace - lam victoria, tarn facilis, scrotum non valet. We always beat Harrow anyway - why bother? I stood up with languid ease.

A junior tick came up, and, tugging at my flannels, grovelled, 'Oh, Chapman, sir, may I clean your teeth tonight, oh please?'

'Why don't you bugger off, shagspot?' I replied tradi-i. Old Salopian for being afraid. (See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths).

tionally, and gave him a sharp clip on the temple with my bat.

'Thank you sir/ he sobbed, and traditionally slumped to the ground.

'Plucky little squit, that young Macmillan, should go far,' I thought.

The sun dappled through the copper-tinted leaves of the beeches along 'Big Wall' as I walked back. 'Lower Downers' seemed strangely calm in that light. Far from the sweltering pitch, it stood like an oasis of quietude in its granite thisness. The air was still, save for the drone of a distant one-seater. Where was it travelling from? Where to? Did it matter? The smell of freshly-mown grass wafted over from far off Hayes Meadow, the village clock chimed in the distance, and somewhere, miles above our petty earth, a wisp of cloud took flame from the dying embers of the setting sun. They combined to produce an atmosphere so redolent of this type of writing.

A faint 'clop' in the distance splintered the fabric of my meditations. A crass intrusion. 'What the hell,' I thought. 'Just for that I shall bloody well bogle up Mikla Passage, and if I meet the Captain of Montem "collecting" "salt" or some "lobsters" "bartering" in the "foricas", I shan't give an Oppidan's "fart".'

I cycled past rows of parental Rolls-Royces, cheap-looking Bentleys, lower-middle Daimlers, and Cadillacs NQOC.1 In a few days I would be in Nice, soaking up the sun at the side of my father's pool, while Jenkins hovered by with a tray of vodkatinis. Someone shouted, 'Hey! Look where you're going!' I looked round to see who it was, and 'Clop!!!'... Everything went beige, with purple bits round the edges. The acrid smell of burning rubber, a stabbing pain in my shoulder, mists swirling before my eyes, and the distant sound of waves crashing on the shore, suddenly stopped.

'Would you like another sandwich, dear?'

'What?'

'They're your favourite, sandwich spread.'

'So this is Nice...'

i. Not Quite Our Class.

I look round. Can it be Nice? We are sitting in our Ford Anglia, my father, my mother and myself, on the Promenade, and all we can see is rain, grey sky, grey sea, and grey waves crashing over a grey sea wall.

'What d'you mean Nice? This is Scarborough. You do too much reading,' says my father. My mother agrees: 'It'd do you more good if you ate your tea.'

'Quite right. You can't get through to him when he's got a book in his hand. What is it anyway?'

'I haven't been reading.'

'What's that then?'

My father leans over and glances at a few lines of the paperback that lies open in my hands. Unfortunately he chooses a paragraph in which two centurions are caressing each other in bed. (That sort of thing quite obviously did not go down well with the police force in those days.) I wobble a little and close the book.

'It's a history book.'

'That's a bee funny sort of a history book. Put it away.'

'What is it dear?' my mother asks.

'Nothing, dear. Put it away, Graham. Don't let your mother see that.'

'What is it?' she insists. I turn to her and explain, 'It's called Claudius the God by Robert Graves - a fine historical reconstruction of the life of Claudius, the republican Roman Emperor, thought of in his time as a pitiful fool, though the reign Mr Graves describes is far from folly.'

'Is it? Harumph!' says my father, as he locks the book in the glove-compartment.

'Graves... Graves... wasn't he born in Wimbledon?' asks my mother.

'No that was Tim Graves.'

'No it wasn't, you remember the Graves. There was Alf, and he married that Amalia von Ranke, a bonny woman. They used to live... er, above the chemist in Thurbid Street, opposite the Gantlets.'

'I never did like the Gantlets - that smelly corgi of theirs. Should have had it put down.'

'They should. Pitiful. Its back legs didn't work. Anyway,

4i

'It's called Claudius the God'

finish your tea. We ought to go and get that haddock for Mrs Riches.'

'There's plenty of time for that later on. Thraxted's doesn't close till five.'

'They're bound to be out of haddock by then.'

'Well, get halibut.'

'Mrs Riches asked specially for haddock.'

'Haddock, halibut, cod - there's no difference. It's all fish. Let's just sit here for a bit and enjoy the view.

'It's raining,' I say.

'It's bracing. You should have your window open, lad. Get a bit of ozone into your lungs.'

'Ozone is oxygen in a condensed state, having three atoms to the molecule. Cb. What you can smell is rotting seaweed.'

'Well, it's good for you.'

'No it isn't.'

'Don't argue with your father.'

'It's these fancy books he's been reading. You can't learn everything out of books my lad.'

'There is no argument. It's a fact.'

'Stop it, Graham. Come on we'll go and get the fish.'

'No we won't. We'll stay here. Open that window and get some fresh air into your lungs.'

My father lights his pipe. The familiar scent of burning rubber fills the car. I cough and open the window, getting a faceful of wind and rain, followed quickly by two and a half pints of icy North Sea.

'I think we should go and get the fish.'

'That ship out there,' says my father, 'is bringing wood from Norway. Coniferous wood, used in the paper-manufacturing industry since the late fifteenth century. The process was originally invented in China by Ts'ai Lun around about A.D. 105, but the first paper mill in England was owned by John Tate in Hertford. The manufacture of continuous lengths, however...'

'Oh the Tates! Wasn't their youngest walking about with that Valerie Maskell?'

'No.'

'Yes he was, the one that took ballet lessons for her fallen arches.'

'No. This process was developed by the stationers, Messrs H. and S. Fourdrinier....'

4It was her. You remember, she was the one that got all the spots at secretarial college.'

'Quiet, Edith. The Fourdriniers were assisted in this by Mr Brian Donkin, an inventor and engineer.'

'Donkin! Wasn't his step-uncle Stephanie a wholesale poulterer in Peatling Parva?'

'No.'

'Yes he was - it was their youngest that moved downstairs next door to the chemists in Wimbledon, nearly opposite the Gantlets.'

'Shut up! D'you realize that if you look out there on a very clear day you can't quite see Denmark? And if you look over there, you would almost catch a glimpse of France if it weren't invisible. Oh, the sea!'

'I think we should get the haddock.'

'Will you shut up about that bloody haddock!'

'Why is it that every bloody year...'

'Language!'

'.... Every year, our summer holiday consists of two weeks in Scarborough, Filey or Bridlington, sitting in a car in the rain, bickering. Why don't we go to bloody Denmark...?'

'Language! It's the toilets.'

'What?! What toilets?'

'Your father can't bear foreign toilets.'

'But he's never been abroad!'

'Your Uncle Harry was in North Africa during the war and their toilets - ugh!'

'But we're talking about DENMARK! Their sanitary facilities make ours look primitive.'

'I suppose you read that in Hygiene in Denmark by Rupert bloody Graves.'

'We did promise haddock.'

'Oh all right! We'll go and get your bloody flaming bloody bloody haddock. The trouble with you two is that you don't appreciate the beauties of nature.'

We drive off through a moderate to heavy spume.

'What's that you've got over there?' my father barks.

'It's a book,' I counter. 'What book?' comes his brusque reply. 7, Biggies, by Captain W. E. Graves,' I riposte. 'Captain, eh? That sounds better,' he re-ripostes, and slams the engine into third....

The plane banked sharply to the left as we hurtled downwards, but the Fokker Wolf was still on our tail.

'A-a-a-a-a-a-a-zing,' went the twin cowl-mounted Mit-telschmertz 25 mm cannons.

'Peng!' it went, in German, as one of the shells bit into the sleek wooden fuselage.

'Peng?' cogitated Biggies. 'That's the German for "Bang!" '

'We've been hit,' volunteered Ginger grimly.

'Nothing,' said Biggies grimlier, as he slipped his leather-gloved hand over the by now moistened joystick. He pulled it back in a series of sharp jerks.

'Level off a mo,' put in Algy drily and through drawn lips stepped purposefully into the body of the aircraft, past the by now shapely nude lady navigator; and back into the rear of the plane. The door of the Gents Only Sauna hung precariously from one hinge. He slammed it shut with a haunting squawk, and fought his way past the two naked WAFs wrestling in perfumed sump-oil. He erupted into the Aft Leather Room, to find Wingco still chained to a cross, wearing the by now familiar black hood bearing the also familiar Wing Commanderic braid.

'Have your way with me, you hunk of manhood,' he hinted coyly.

'What ho, old sport!' hazarded Algy gingerly. 'I say, old man, the Group's a bit dashed worried - thinks you might have some kind of, well... you know, problem... you old bison....' He fingered his cigarette nervously.

'Don't worry about me, old tapir, I've pulled through a lot worse than this.'

The plane lurched suddenly as Biggies swerved to avoid a hail of bullets that pumped in spurts out of the penis-like nosecone of the pursuing Fokker. Algy rushed for'ard.

'Everything OK, Skipper?' he admitted.

'We haven't made it yet/ inserted Biggies, as he gritted his thighs and plunged his machine into a savage spin.

As they plunged downwards, the mighty engines throbbed and the well-lubricated pistons thrust themselves back and forth in their vice-like steel sheaths.

'You look a bit green around the gills, old eland,' observed Biggies smoothly.

'Never felt better,' puked Algy. 'Sorry about the mess,' he opined.

'Why can't you just say things?' snorted Biggies. 'Tell you what, old man, having a bit of trouble with this one, could you just pop your hand down my Mae West?'

'If it's an order, old guillemot.'

'It is,' grinned Biggies.

'Right-ho, here it comes.' Algy plunged a questing sensitive hand into the Group Captain's flying jacket.

The plane soared upwards.

'Don't stop now, I'm nearly there.'

'So am I.'

'Oooooh!'

'Aaaaah!'

'Ooo-ooh!' ejaculated Biggies and Algy together. They were through. The white silence of a cloud surrounded them.

'What about me?' rasped Ginger.

'Fuck off a sec. Ooooh,' oohed Biggies and Algy. Then suddenly they were through it. Peace. Calm. Ecstasy. They floated, as one, in a post-what can't be described in a children's book sort of feeling.

Ginger had missed out again, but he was used to this, and easing himself back into his cold leather chair, mused, 'To heck with the lot of'em, I'll just jolly well sit down here and improve the bally old mind a little, don't you know?'

Languidly he cold-chiselled his way through the padlock on his Air Survival Reading Kit and snapped the seal of the 2*5 ml. phial containing Tincture of Cricket Pavilion. He clicked it neatly into the 'glue-sniffing' socket on his oxygen mask and ran his rapidly glazing eyes over the Emergency Inflight Reading list. The Complete Works of Captain W. E. Johns, How to Speak English in Other Languages, The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud....

46

'It is,' grinned Biggies

'That's dashed odd,' he thought. 'Hun Yid Lit.! Must have a gander....' Cautiously he opened the volume, and gasped as he read inside the cover, 'Happy Barmitzvah, Algernon, old ocelot, keep off the pork, love Aunt Rachel already, what?' So that's why Algy always wore his swimming-togs in the showers! The flipping bounder!

As the subtle aroma of grass-clippings, blancoed canvas, and linseed oil swathed his olfactory organs, he flicked through the pages with curiosity....' "Theories of Dreaming and Its Function". Mmm,' flick-flick, he went.... "Symbols in Dreams". Mmm... no.... "Sexual Symbols in Dreams". Mmm.... no.... "Sexual Symbols in Breams"? Mmm... maybe....'... Then 'thwack!' It was as if he had been struck nose before wicket by a cricket-box hurled at full stench.... ' "NAVIGATIONAL DREAMS" - Spot on, chocks away!' he enthused, and read hungrily on:

'In the following pages I shall prove that the entire psychology of man can only be understood with reference to the science of navigation. ["Quite right," interposed Ginger.] I remember a thirty-five-year-old patient whose pre-pubertal son was having recurrent nightmares in which he would push a raspberry up his left nostril and run into the middle of the lounge shouting "Pelmets!" This caused such embarrassment that his father punished him by making him stand on a window-ledge holding a whole punnet of raspberries. They became so heavy that he lost his balance and fell down the fac;e of a huge white cliff in the shape of a gendarme's nose, after which he woke up to find himself inexplicably in the sea at the bottom of a cliff. In later discussions with the boy, it became apparent that to him the raspberries represented raspberries, and the cliff was in fact a cliff. But to the psychoanalyst, the cliff is a glaring symbol of a navigation-fetish.

'Man's life is divided into two phases: I Childhood, and 2 Navigation. Childhood is divided into the following stages: (i) Heavy petting navigation; (ii) Coital navigation; (hi) Embryonic navigation; (iv) Foetal navigation; (v) Neo-natal navigation; (vi) Infantile navigation; (vii) the Pre-pubertal navigational spurt; (viii) Pubertal navigational day; and (ix)

Post-pubertal navigation - beginning of marine period (onset of Regenwettertraum *).

At this point we come into the longer phase, Navigation (2), which we may divide, with Aesculapius, Galen, Patanjali, Nietzsche, Marx, Len Deighton, and Hitler's dog, into:

2 (i) At sea

2 (ii) On land

2 (iii) In the air

2 (iv) Other places "2 (i) Navigation at sea" may be divided into the following broad categories:

2 (i) (a) On top of the sea

2 (i) (P) Under it

2 (i) (y) Quite close to the sea, but not actually

getting your feet wet (Schwuhlwasserfussbeklei-

dungnichtgestellt)2 "2 (i) (a) Navigation on top of the sea" can be further divided into:

2 (i) (a) (3K) On top of the sea in the Northern

Hemisphere;

2 (i) (a) (H) On top of the sea in the Southern

Hemisphere; For clarity I shall divide these into a further Four Categories:

1. There would appear to be no equivalent in our language for this Viennese peasant word. The nearest would, I suppose, be 'soggy dreams'.

2. This Viennese student pork-butcher's slang word means literally, 'My God, there goes a clever psychoanalyst'; it is also an allusion to Twelve Bream in My Wellingtons by Horatio Nelson (Adm.), a puzzling title which Freud was later brilliantly to interpret as 'an obvious apostolic complex' in which Nelson himself plays the Christ-figure: bream representing the early Christian fish-symbol, and at the same time an overt corruption of the word 'dream' quite common in navigational dreams ('bream', vide supra). 'He was also clearly in love with an as yet unborn military rubber fetishist.' Freud intended later to expand this footnote into twelve volumes, provisionally entitled, Generals, Admirals, Oedipus, Vagina-Envy, Fish, Christ, Masturbation, Oh and all sorts of other things like Cucumbers, Radishes, Figs, Donkeys, Other People's Bottoms, Gail-Bladder Fixations, Teeth, Snow, Hash, Uppers, Downers, Bakelite Underwear, Sports Commentators, Pole- Vaulting, and the Great Vaseline Boom; but sadly this was not to be. He died, leaving Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber to translate it into the Broadway smash-hit, Kiss My Twat, an all-goat musical comedy.

2 (i) (a) (5K) (^c) On top of the sea in the Western part of the Northern Hemisphere; 2 (i) (a) (}K) (y|EJ) On top of the sea in the Eastern part of the Northern Hemisphere; 2 (i) a) (3K) (|Sf) On top of the sea in the Western part of the Southern Hemisphere; 2 (i) (a) (5K) (J£) On top of the sea in the Eastern part of the Southern Hemisphere; 'The reader must be aware that this is only a crude classification, good enough in the time of Magellan, but, since the researches of Troublemacher, now revealed to be only the tip of the penguin. The latter postulates the following:

2 (i) (a) (JK) $5) (j^) On top of the sea in the

Northern part of the Western part of the Northern Hemisphere;

2 (i) (a) (3K) (^) (S^) On top of the sea in the

Southern part of the Western part of the Northern Hemisphere;

2 (i) (a) (JK) (^) (_-kn) On top of the sea in the

Northern part of the Eastern part of the Northern Hemisphere;

2 (i) (a) (jk) (^) (jj) On top of the sea in the

Southern part of the Eastern part of the Northern

Hemisphere;

And so on up to:

(2) (i) (a) (EC) (£5) (^}P) On top of the sea in the

Southern part of the Eastern part of the Southern

Hemisphere. 'Since Troublemacher, however, tremendous strides have been made in the field of geo-physics, in particular recognition of the shifting of the earth's magnetic poles, and it is now considered more scientifically valid to be more geogra-pho-specific. This leads us to a huge list, which is obviously beyond the scope of this book to quote in full, but includes the following:

230 Part of the Timor Sea known as Yampi Sound, off the North Part of Western Australia; 750,829 A portion of the sea 4V2 km to the East of Platiyalos on the island of Mykonos (Gr.) known locally as- 6 yiakoc, onov avxvdCovv 8X01 01 t-ivoi cotovroc Km ixderovv ra yevvrjxixa rovg oqyava *

io395 A patch of sea 2 inches square, 59 metres along a line drawn between the institute of physics in Copenhagen and Bentley's ice-cream stall on the beach at Scarborough (Eng.) io395+i Beneath Biggies.' 'Beneath Biggies! That's damn clever,' he haemoptysized, and read on.

'In relation to this I remember a twenty-nine-year-old female patient whose exactly adolescent son was having recurrent dreams about flying. In one dream - which he was able to recall particularly vividly because he was on a youth-hostelling holiday in the Lake District, and his red-haired companion in the bunk above him had fallen asleep, dropping a navigational handbook, which spiralled down and struck him on the temple, causing the rapid onset of wakefulness -a fictional aviator called Bigglesworth and his companions are attempting to escape from a Fokker Wolf which is pursuing them and shooting at them. They are hit somewhere in the back of the plane and Algy (one of Biggies' companions) goes to inspect the damage. It is not serious. After a routine exchange with a Wing Commander in the rear compartment of the plane, he returns to the pilot's cabin to report that all is well. There his Group Captain is having trouble with his flying jacket, but with Algy's help manages to sort it out and escape the pursuing Fokker at the same time. A typical dream-recall of a particularly exciting episode in an adventure story for boys. Or so it would seem.

'Let us look at the dream more closely. The first thing we notice is that the description is full of overt references to changes in direction ("the plane banked sharply to the left",

I. Untranslatable, but means 'the beach where lots of foreign perverts go and wave their genitals about.'

395. This means 10 to the power of 395, and is not a footnote.

"the plane lurched suddenly", "Biggies swerved to avoid the pursuing Fokker"), an unmistakable symptom of navigational obsessions. Note also the use of zoological terminology in their navigational exchanges with one another ("old bison", "old tapir" and even "oldguillemot' '), clearly indicating a yearning for a pre-rational, animal state of existence, in which navigation was not yet distinguishable from simply running around. The boy patient clearly identifies himself with the minor character, Ginger, who is excluded from the adventure because he is navigationally inadequate/

At this point Ginger stopped reading. 'Ginger?' he thought. 'That's me! Inadequate?' What a bally awful tome don't you know. What ho, old chap!' He slid back the bake-lite window, and grinned through steel lips as he watched the book hurtle in a plinth-defying spiral towards an angry North Sea....

'Clop!'

I had been struck on the head, causing rapid wakefulness. The Anglia was now parked outside Thraxted's fish shop, with my mother inside, engaged in the purchase of haddock, and my father saying,

'You've been bloody reading again!'

'I haven't.'

'Well what's this in my hand?'

'Oh, it's The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, probably his most original work, in which he discovered a way of exploring the unconscious and found that neurotic symptoms are like dreams in that they are a product of the conflict and compromise between the conscious and unconscious states. He was able to...'

'Is it?' he said, as he thumbed through the pages. 'What's this?... "As a little girl she remembered her older brother and his friends asking her to remove her undergarments and perform cartwheels, thus displaying her genitalia to their curious gaze. In later life she..." '

'I've got the haddock. What were you saying? What's that book?'

'Nothing.' The glove compartment opened and closed. 'Nothing, just a road-map.'

'Who's Freud then?'

'He's an expert on... navigation. He's very interesting, his theories of navigation, you see, longitude and latitude...'

'Ah well, that's enough of that. Let's get back to Mrs Riches with this haddock.'

'Right!'

Quite a lot happened over the next few years, a disastrous sexual experiment with Rita Blake; my first love affair with another boy; stuffing snails into a gatepost with Annette Hoy; the hen-stealing nuns; Pigshit Freeman; Miss Chamberlain's three consecutive head-girls pregnant; my questions about ejaculation to a biology master; Anthony Blond and a book called Health and Hygiene for Secondary Schoolgirls, written by myself and my brother; Albert the groundsman; me holding hands with Mark Collins in a maths class; the couple copulating in the French library; Painting John Willder black; 'Who knows Eskimo Nell?'; M'sieur le bog va pooh; purple smoke; little boys' eardrums; 'This is a raid'; and elderly spinsters wanking off birthday cakes - but such trivia need no elaboration. One childhood is much like another. Amateur psychologists who think it's clever to explain the character of the later man from a jumble of largely fictitious memories can ferret for their filth in other people's autobiographies. They have opened the wrong book.

CHAPTER THREE

Cambridge

Cutting Up Dead Bodies. Explosions. The Only Sensitive Thing About The Vagina. Zinc Envelope Tongs.

Cambridge. A university town built // in a featureless, flat landscape - so / featureless and flat you wonder why Anyone chose it as a location for anything. 'The magnificence of St John's, the Noteworthy splendour of Trinity, the sheer pauntliness of "The Backs"... and, gazing at the magnificent, noteworthy, sheer splendour of the pauntly King's College Chapel, it would be a world-weary traveller indeed who did not pause to think, "Why the fuck didn't they build the whole town two inches to the right?"

A fair, if somewhat rudely couched question, to which an answer may be found only by turning back the clocks of time....

Let us imagine it is the year 1282. An urgent message arrives at the court of King Edward I. 'Most noble sire, I have built a bridge over the River Cam.' The royal reply, despatched with all regal velocity, reads, 'Whatever for?'

'Thus the enterprising but foolhardy pontifect was left with a bridge on his hands, since it was apparent to every-

one that this newly-constructed thoroughfare, leading as it did from nowhere in particular to nowhere else at all, was a fumble. Occasional passers-by would point and mock, saying "Who's the bloody fool that build a bridge here? Ha ha ha!" "I don't know, must be wrong in the head," he would reply, puce with shame. For years he sat by the bridge, wearing a weak smile, until one autumn he was hit on the head by a Golden Delicious. "Eureka!" he barked evenly with a Job-like disregard for time and place. Then, in a daze, he made his second big mistake. Rather than building some decent restaurants, a couple of pubs, and a laundromat to attract human beings to his bridge, he hit on the rather dull idea of erecting some very high walls behind which a semi-aristocratic elite could hide from the outside world and go to each others' rooms for sherry....' (An extract from Rev. E. Shepherd-Walwyn, The Bridge Over the River Cam, 1884.)

It is the year 1958. A Ford Anglia is juddering south along the A604, containing Chief Inspector and Mrs Chapman and a rather spotty figure, precociously dressed in the kind of suit that he thinks doctors might wear. He also has on a rugby club tie, and is busily reading The Daily Telegraph, trying to catch up on current affairs - a mistake he's never made since.1 'What,' he [I] thinks, 'will the Master of Emmanuel College ask me [him]?' His [my] headmaster has told me [him (me)] to let him, [not I (him)] do the talking, agree with him most of the time, but to disagree strongly on a few points to show that I [he, (that is me [I])] have one or two brain-cells. If he asks me any questions about English grammar I'll be up shit-creek....

So I left two quivering parents, and attempted to saunter past a lot of very important-looking people in gowns, and stared round the courtyard. I could see no sign of a Master's Lodge. Overawed by the pauntly magnificence of the groups of overtly musing academics, I asked an old gardener where it was. He told me. I found the door, but I was a quarter of an hour early, so I walked around for a time, trying not to

This is no lie.

look conspicuous, and wondering why everyone was staring at me. At last it was four o'clock. I knocked on the door, and was greeted by the gardener, who asked me to come through to his study.

I said 'Yes' quite a lot, and nodded, particularly when he was talking about the history of coal-mining and the Industrial Revolution. But when asked whether I was going to pass my A-levels I gave a definite 'No' to Physics. He was clearly impressed by this and at last sensing a possible argument, thrust forward his head, raised his eyebrows to the point of nearly covering his bald patch, and asked, 'Why not?'

'Well, I'm not sure.'

'Not sure? Ah, that means you're in doubt?'

'Well... yes.'

'Do you mean yes?'

'... Er, yes.'

'So a pass is quite possible?'

'Yes, possible.'

'Probable even?'

'Weill... er...'

'Let me put it another way. Are you going to fail?'

'No.'

'Good, then we'll see you next October.'

I left, and stood for a moment in the corridor, trying to work out whether he had said 'yes' or 'no'. I decided that it amounted to an almost definite 'yes', walked back through the courtyard feeling that it was mine already, and was rather annoyed that no-one was staring at me.

'How did it go?' said the Anglia.

'Oh fine. Mind you, I've got to pass Physics.'

'Well, you'll do that,' it said, 'won't you?'

'Yes,' I replied confidently. The engine choked a few times, and then purred into motion.

'I think we've licked them this time,' said Flying Officer Edith, casting a victorious eye over the fast-disappearing Seat of Learning she had come to hate during her one-and-a-quarter-hour ordeal. Chief Inspector Biggies opened the throttle. He relaxed back into his seat with a satisfied grin, as the familiar drone of the 927 cc engine sped us on our way to

eternity and sandwich-spread on toast.

A week later I was beginning to have my doubts. Could the man really have said 'yes'? Just like that? Would the rest of the college back up a gardener's judgement on my admission to Cambridge University? I was glad that while waiting for written confirmation I had been accepted by two London teaching hospitals — more realistic goals for a Melton Mowbray grammar-school oik.

At St Swithin's Hospital I had been submitted to twenty seconds of searching questions: dean; Play rugby? me: Yes. warden: We've got a John Chapman here. Is he any relation

of yours? me: He's my brother. warden: Right. See you in September. dean: Wait a moment. What position d'you play? me: Second row. dean: September it is, then.

St Mary's was if anything much tougher. I was seated in a room with a no-page intelligence-test to be completed in fifteen minutes. An official started the clock and left me to it. After ten minutes I was still less than half way through and, as always in moments of panic, I thought, 'Steady on old man, you are English' and stopped. I lit my pipe and stared blankly at the clock for a whole minute, picked it up out of curiosity, toyed with it, and put it down again. Somehow or other, it seemed I now had another ten minutes to spare, which I thought I might as well spend completing their test. 'Hang on, aren't you cheating?' I asked myself. 'Yes, intelligently,' I replied. After lunch I returned for my interview. As I entered, the two interviewers flinched, because as far as they were concerned they were looking at a person with an I.Q. of 495. They blinked a little, nervously, and fell back onto the only line of questioning which they thought could outmanoeuvre Einstein and Ber-trand Russell rolled into one: dean: D'you play much sport?

me: I'm very fond of mountaineering, but I've only led a few very severe climbs, and I'm not very experienced

on snow and ice work. I play second row for Melton Mowbray Rugby Football Club First Team, and my brother is captain of the 'A' XV at Barts, though despite being six foot four inches tall I'm faster than him over ioo yards, having clocked 10-4 seconds at the age of fifteen-and-a-half, and I was second in the all-England Amateur Athletics Association 440-yard competition last year, the winner of which was Malcolm Yardley who equalled the European record of 40-1 seconds. I limped in a poor three seconds later, but it's not really my distance, and I only entered out of curiosity. They apologized for not being able to think of any other questions, and said that unfortunately they would not be able to offer me a professorial chair for another seven years although it would be there for the asking if I could bear to wait that long....

So by the end of the day I knew I could have a place at either St Swithin's or Mary's. I was still uncertain about Cambridge, but felt just sufficiently euphoric to join my brother later that evening at St Swithin's where he was holding his twenty-first birthday party.

When I arrived he was wearing a pin-stripe suit, a blood-coloured white shirt with a neatly stitched gash over his right eye and a bandaged right fist. The fist was the result of an assault he'd made on a fruit-machine in the Goat and Compasses. Apparently the rugby team had lost that day, and the thought of the fruit-machine beating him as well was too much. As the team were asked to leave the public house, someone decided it would be a good idea to climb into the coach and drive it through the window of a shop selling adding machines. Ten of the first XV found themselves in Casualty at their very own Regal and Historic Hospital, where a lot of very hushed-up stitching was done, and the unfortunate amateur-driver found himself several thousand pounds in debt. He is now a very successful and much respected doctor. I can't give his name but it is in fact Dr Charles Haughey.

All I remember about the party was that a rather large gentleman threw a pint pot at someone called Mcllroy who

had evidently not played awfully well. Fortunately he moved in time, and the pot embedded itself in the wall where his head had been. Affected by the relaxed atmosphere, I managed to persuade two others to help me throw painters' ladders and planks out of the fifth floor window, and we all watched the pleasant smashing effect they had on the railings beneath.

The next morning I woke up from a drunken coma to find myself inexplicably back in my bed in Melton Mowbray. I stumbled downstairs to breakfast. Perhaps yesterday's events had all been part of a drunken dream. But they couldn't have been. I definitely remembered my brother congratulating me on being accepted at St Swithin's. That was why I had drunk so much....

I sat down to face breakfast with a spinning head and a mouth that could have been a British Rail ashtray. There was still no news from Cambridge. Suddenly there was a bellow from the direction of the front door of our house, which stood in the not particularly pauntly grounds of Melton Mowbray police station. My mother swept into the kitchen with a white envelope, gripped in the King George V Jubilee Commemoration zinc envelope-tongs. The jaws of the great tongs parted, and the envelope thffed onto the blue formica breakfast-table.

'It's from Cambridge,' she shrieked, feigning nonchalance.

'Kiss me Hardy,' I said, and broke the seal of my fate....

I read the letter four times, looked out of the window for a moment, and read it again.

'What does it say,' said Edith.

'It says... it says... I think it says...' I went outside, walked around the house twice, and came back in to read the letter again. It had gone. There was nothing there... 'Oh well,' I thought. 'May as well finish my breakfast. You're mad, Chapman - we haven't got any zinc envelope-tongs, you were thinking of the Edward VIII Abdication mug which will be very valuable one day if we keep it long enough....'

There were two matriarchal bellows in the distance accompanied by the yapping of handicapped corgis. I looked

out of the window at the Assistant Chief Constable's house (naturally much grander than ours) and saw 'Shandy' dragging herself across the lawn — and though two under par in the leg department she was still very much a yapping concern. And there at the Assistant Chief Constablitic back door were And Mrs Chapman and And Mrs Ashcroft, resplendent in full evening dress about to commence their procession towards the big doors of the police station. There was a reverent hush from the crowd of non-commissioned officers and wives as the serene couple joined their husbands, wearing full Officers' Mess uniform, at the top of the big steps. As they paused briefly to acknowledge the crowd, cameras flashed and the Leicester Tatler caught the moment for posterity as:

Seen here enjoying a joke are (I. to r.) Assistant Chief Constable and Mrs Ashcroft and Chief Inspector and Mrs Chapman. Miss Jane Ashcroft (featured as Lay of the Month in our last issue) is expected to announce her engagement shortly to Mr Graham Chapman. Eyebrows have been raised in certain circles at this match, but Jane explained yesterday, 'We are very much in love. The fact that Graham has been accepted by Cambridge University has something at all to do with it.

I ran up, snatched the letter, dashed through the big doorway, grabbed a bunch of keys, ran upstairs, and locked myself in the snooker room. The letter was genuine. I had been accepted by Emmanuel College. But 1 decided with Darwin and Mendel that intra-constabulary breeding would be evolutionary folly. I had no wish to be sire to a brood of runted bluebottles.

Within four hours I had the Assistant Chief Constable on his knees outside the door, begging me to surrender this, the nerve-centre of his entire division. He agreed to my terms, the marriage was called off, and all two-hundred-and-sixteen copies of the Leicester Tatler were seized in a Midnight Suspected Porn Raid and spontaneously ignited while resisting arrest.

Calm was restored. Jane lived ever after, married to a man who looked like Sir Keith Joseph, and I ran away and hid for the entire summer, looking after a herd of goats in Cayton Bay.

I had passed all my A-levels and was very pleased to get 65% in Physics and an amazing 185% in Chemistry. Unfortunately I'd been taking the exams of the Oxford University Board, which were regarded with snotty-nosed contempt by the University of Cambridge. Apparently no-one knew anything about Chemistry in Oxford - they were all too busy lounging around in bottle-green velvet suits holding lilies and quoting lines by Tim Bryden and Denis Keat. This meant that I had to take a separate exam in Organic Chemistry.



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