AS YOU may know, we have a by-pass round Cartersfield, and we can now sleep away our days without being disturbed by the thunder of passing lorries and the curses of their drivers as they try to overtake each other at eighty miles an hour along our High Street. Now when they built the thing they had, naturally, to seize land from the various patriots who owned it, compensating them with cash, a procedure which seems to me admirable in every way. Among the many plots seized near Chapman’s Wood was a corner of a field owned by Brigadier Hobson, and though he complained bitterly at the time about the loss of liberty of the subject involved in a compulsory purchase order, we all suspected that he was secretly delighted, since the only function of the field was to make a pleasant surround for his drive, and anyway there was still another field between him and the main road, and who, for God’s sake, ever objects to money? Besides, it was highly unlikely that he could have sold the field for the price the county gave him for one bit of it. And though, following the splendid example of Lady Eden and her remark about the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing-room, he went about saying he was having a main road put through his bedroom, this was so obvious an untruth that everyone just laughed, and he soon forgot the monstrous invasion of privacy of which he had complained.
Well, the by-pass was built, and everyone said how nice it was that you could hear yourself think these days, though the idea that any of them have ever had a thought worth thinking is simply absurd. They are nice, dull people here in Cartersfield, and if they did actually think it would be, to use a phrase Hobson is fond of, simply frightful. When Molly Simpson decided to be a poetess and took up with those awful literary people in Slough and tried to start a Poetry Circle here, it was unspeakably frightful, so I know what I’m talking about. But that’s another story, and the point here is that it really was rather nice to be able to not-think in peace and quiet for a change.
Well, two or three years later Hobson and his wife, who is called Evangeline, poor woman, went off to the Alps for a fortnight and for what he called ‘a bit of walking’, though everyone else suspected that it would be a bit of drinking for him and a bit of quiet knitting for her while they listened to other people talking about the beauty of the gentians. I loathe Switzerland, and only people as wholly devoid of imagination as the Hobsons could possibly enjoy spending a fortnight there in summer, or so I consider. But off they went, and when they came back, around the end of July, it was, as usual, raining, in fact it rained throughout the Bank Holiday week-end with a deliberate dribbling malice.
But it wasn’t the rain that annoyed him. He’d got back to England after that tiresome train journey, he’d reached Cartersfield without losing a single piece of luggage, he’d picked up his car from Trinder’s Garage, and he’d set off to his home with that tremendous English satisfaction at being back in the land of the normal, where everyone understands what you’re saying, and there’s none of that vile insolence from damned foreign waiters. He drove along the by-pass to his driveway, and what he saw when he made the turn must have made him think for a ghastly minute that he was still a protesting victim of woppish and woggish loathsomeness. Because right next to his drive, a few feet beyond his fence, in the next field, there was a huge sign advertising some particularly offensive form of hair tonic, designed for adolescents so that they may win girls and annoy their parents. A young man was grinning inanely down, with the comb still in his hand, his face about ten feet long and his teeth as white as a detergent advertisement, and to his left in big blue letters it said ‘LOOK GROOMED FEEL GROOMED BE GROOMED WITH AXELGREECE’ or whatever the stuff was called.
What Brigadier Hobson said when he first saw it we none of us know, though most of us can make a pretty shrewd guess, but we do know that within minutes he was phoning Jack Solomons who owns the field which had been desecrated. Jack told us about it himself. He came roaring into the Brunswick Arms that night and ordered a double whisky and gave us what he was pleased to call ‘the low-down’. He was laughing so hard he kept spilling his drink, which upset Sam Palmer, the landlord, but between splutters we heard how Hobson had rung him up six times in the last hour, and that Jack had then left his receiver off the hook, not because he wasn’t enjoying Hobson’s explosions, but because he thought it would annoy the old man still more not to be able to address him directly. Then he left his house, and planned to spend the evening moving about from place to place, hoping, wrongly as it turned out, that Hobson would come after him with a whip, and that he would always be one move ahead.
‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ said Jack. ‘Twice he’s threatened to court-martial me, and once to sue me for spoiling his property. He talks like a sergeant-major who’s been reading some law book. You’d never believe the things he says.’
Everyone looked at him, and someone laughed loudly, but on the whole the reaction was indifferent.
‘How much do you get for that sign, Jack?’ said Sam.
‘A nice little bit,’ said Jack, and he laughed some more, though not quite so loudly as before, then he finished his drink and said: ‘Tell him I was here, will you?’
Then he went out. We could hear him starting up his Jaguar, and then he roared off to tell the story somewhere else.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Sam.
‘The Brigadier won’t be in here,’ said Harry Mengel, ‘not bloody likely.’
There was a general agreement.
‘Silly bloody fool,’ said someone, but as no one was quite sure which man he was talking about, no one took him up.
The truth was that no one cared very much for Brigadier Hobson. We tolerated him, and we let him think he was someone important, but we didn’t pay very much attention to him, and we laughed more at him than with him, not that he was much of a man for jokes. He used to come into the Brunswick Arms every Sunday morning after church for a glass of sherry. Sam always said that he was the only man in Cartersfield who ever drank the stuff, and that it was more trouble than it was worth keeping a bottle just for him, but then Sam was lying, of course, because there were always men dropping in, with blonde women of doubtful age tagging along behind them, on their way to or from Maidenhead, and the blonde women always asked for sherry, whatever time of day or night they might happen to be passing through. Anyway, Hobson didn’t spend much time in the Brunswick Arms on other days of the week, and when he did come it was inevitably to the private bar, never to the public one, so we hardly saw him. We’d hear him asking for his sherry and saying: ‘Good morning, Palmer,’ and Sam would wink at us and give him his drink, and then he’d put his head round the partition and say: ‘Good morning,’ and we would all say: ‘’Morning, Brigadier,’ and this always annoyed him, because he wanted us to call him ‘Sir’, but we were damned if we were going to do that, sherry or no sherry. Then his head would go back round the partition again, closely followed by his little white moustache.
But if we didn’t care much for Hobson, we weren’t exactly crazy about Jack Solomons, either. His family have always lived in Cartersfield, and when his father died we all felt quite sorry, because he was a nice man in a way—he ran the drapers’, and though you can never get anything you want in Cartersfield shops, he was quite friendly and open about admitting that he hadn’t got whatever it was you wanted, and that he would really much rather you didn’t ask him to order it for you. Jack was smarter than that, he expanded the store, modernized it a bit, generally chivvied the place up, and now, instead of being a sort of funeral parlour hung with cheap suits, it’s a coffee bar hung with cheap suits, only without the coffee. And he actually presses you to buy something, which his father would never have dreamed of doing, and he goes out of his way to suggest that he can always order what he hasn’t got in stock. Now the whole point about a place like Cartersfield is that you can dream about getting yourself, say, a new suit, without ever thinking you’ll really do so. You go into a shop and look at patterns and rub cloth between your thumb and finger and nod sagely, and then you say: ‘I don’t think this is quite what I’m looking for, but I’ll think about it,’ and then you go away and don’t think about it, but you do feel virtuous because you have, after all, tried, and when you simply have to get a new suit, you go in and buy one off the peg in ten minutes like everyone else. You can go into a shop without feeling morally obliged to help the shopkeeper make his living, if you see what I mean. But when Jack took over from his father things began to change. And now you find yourself buying something much grander and more expensive than you really want, and though he sells good stuff it’s somehow uncomfortable. For one thing you feel a fool if you walk around in a smart new suit—people aren’t used to that sort of thing in Cartersfield—so you end up with a suit you never wear, still needing a cheap one, but no longer able to pay for it. Basically, I think, we’re the sort of people who like to buy things, but hate having them sold to us. That’s all we have against Jack, really, he makes us feel uneasy. And though we admire him for his push and his go and all the rest of that commercial cant, we don’t really like him. He belongs, perhaps, in a slightly bigger town. He’s tall, and his hands are always a little too clean, and he wears thick-rimmed glasses. It’s those glasses, perhaps, which make us uneasy. His old dad always wore gold-rimmed ones, and we don’t care much for change.
Well, what he’d done was quite simple. Some frightful fellow, as Hobson put it, had come round trying to buy advertising space, or whatever they call it, in the fields along the new bit of road.
‘Had a letter from him myself,’ said Hobson. ‘Wrote and told him what I thought about the idea. Chap never answered.’
But Jack, never slow to see where the good things in life, such as his Jaguar, came from, was much more accommodating to the advertising man, a thickset sad-looking fellow called Richards, and before anyone knew what was happening Richards had arranged for the billboard with its sickening young man to be put up right away, thus giving, though not, I think, intentionally, a terrible shock to old Hobson as he made the turn off the by-pass into his drive.
Now I don’t know what Hobson did that night, after Jack left the receiver off, but next morning he was still exploding with an extraordinary regularity. It was as though the bile springs gushed four times an hour, on the quarter, or like one of those hideous banging things that the idiot children tie to my drain-pipe every Guy Fawkes Night. I have earplugs, actually, not that the idiot children know that, but not even earplugs could have silenced Hobson. So incensed was he that he was prepared to stoop, to let his principles slide, to make any and every effort to get moral support against Jack. He wanted, it seemed, to have him ostracized, or, as he put it, ‘exported’. We met, as it happened, outside the Brunswick Arms, and for five minutes he gave me a pithy and extremely unfair statement of the situation as he saw it, not that he could see very much that morning, blind as he was with rage.
When he’d temporarily calmed down, though the springs of bile continued to gurgle away, we went into the public bar, since I was leading the way. Hobson looked a little startled when he saw where he was, no doubt remembering hours in the sergeants’ mess, but he looked round and said ‘Good morning’ affably enough to the two or three soaks who were there.
‘Ah, Palmer. Good morning to you.’
‘Good morning, Brigadier,’ said Sam, trying not to look surprised to see Hobson and me together. ‘A glass of sherry?’
‘Make it two halves,’ I said.
At this Sam looked incredulous. The feud which Hobson and I had been conducting for several years in a desultory fashion was well known. We never actually came out and told each other to our faces that we hated each other’s guts, but our relations were, as they say, strained. We represent, in our different ways, the radical and the reactionary as far as these exist in a place like Cartersfield. Harry Mengel, who is an active radical, doesn’t really count, because he’s interested in national affairs. Hobson and I never lowered ourselves to discuss anything but local issues. However, there are occasions when left and right may join together to defeat the machinations of the centre, and both will, given a chance, cite the same general principles—preservation of the landscape, individual liberty and various other meaningless phrases designed to cover personal interest with a high-sounding mess of platitudes. When one is really furious about something, there is always some principle which one can use to gain the support of all those men and women who regard themselves as right-thinking. For sheer political humbug I don’t think the British can be beaten.
When we’d sat down at a table with our beer, and when Sam had stopped raising his eyebrows at me behind Hobson’s back, I said: ‘It’s a sign of the times, Brigadier.’ He failed to see the joke, so I said: ‘A bad business, Brigadier, a bad business.’ It’s one of my favourite phrases when talking to the protagonist of a particularly ridiculous row.
Hobson looked at me and snorted. ‘Bad? It’s absolutely monstrous!’ Then he lowered his voice and leaned across the table towards me, trailing, I noticed with detached delight, his cuff in a beer puddle. ‘I say, Drysdale,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I ask you rather a ticklish question?’
I felt like saying ‘No’, for the sheer hell of it, and in remembrance of our past differences, but since I was, on the whole, on his side, and in any case wanted to know what kind of question he thought ticklish, I said: ‘Of course, Brigadier, anything you like.’
‘This fellow Solomons—is he—you know?’
‘I don’t quite follow your question, Brigadier.’
He blushed, for which I suppose I ought to give him credit, and then he cleared his throat and said: ‘I mean—is he—you know—one of the tribe?’
‘Do you mean,’ I said, raising my voice, and enjoying myself watching him blush still more, ‘is he Jewish?’
He nodded and coughed.
Now if there’s one thing to which I am unalterably opposed it is racial prejudice of any kind, including any prejudice against my own mongrel breed, and if it had been anyone other than Hobson I might have got extremely angry. But since it was Hobson, and since it gave me yet another argument against him, for which I might later be grateful, I was only moderately angry. I didn’t, you see, expect our alliance to last. However, I held him in suspense for a moment or two, then I shook my head and said: ‘No, Brigadier. Jack Solomons is every bit as British as you or I.’
Hobson winced. He drank his beer and wiped his moustache. ‘Hmm. Name sounds Jewish.’
Well, I don’t know or care about anyone’s antecedents, and how can one be certain about a thing like that? It’s my own private belief that there will be no peace and quiet in the world until every man, woman and child is a complete racial stew, with fair hair, slanted eyes, black skin, hooked nose and aboriginal sin. And I also suspect that anyone who calls himself English is, as likely as not, fortunate not to know who his great-grandparents were. We all, I hope, have a little bit of foreign matter in us somewhere. Way back, perhaps, but somewhere.
So I said: ‘There’s no doubt about it, Brigadier. I knew his father and mother, and two more English people it would be impossible to find.’
‘Pity,’ said Hobson. Then he realized he shouldn’t have said it, and asked me if I’d have another.
So we had another, and this time he spoke at great length about the perfidy, treason, tastelessness and general caddishness of Jack Solomons.
‘It’s not,’ he said, ‘merely that this frightful thing is next to my own property, though I find that particularly offensive. It’s the whole question of saving the English landscape from vandals. I rang up the Council for the Preservation of Rural England this morning. Tommy Doyle has something to do with it. Entirely on my side, of course, entirely. He’s going to look into it. See what he can do. And then these things are dangerous, you know. People take their eyes off the road. Damned dangerous.’
‘Bloody dangerous,’ I said.
‘People can’t be allowed to go round putting up damned great billboards. Absolute disgrace. I’ve written to the Member. And the local paper. I rang up Harold Gwatkin this morning—he’s on the county council, you know—and he’s going to see what he can do. Have to use every means to stop this sort of thing.’
Now, as I’ve said, Brigadier Hobson and I would certainly never vote for the same man for any political office, even if I voted, which on the whole I don’t, except to register my disgust with the current bunch of politicians. I usually take the line that both sides are unspeakable, and that what we need is either some form of primitive anarchy or total government control, and I get a certain pleasure from hearing my self called ‘irresponsible’. But this time I was glad our MP was a Tory, and that Gwatkin, a notorious semi-Fascist who runs simply as an anti-Socialist (a pretty apt term for him, if you ask me), were on the currently governing side. I have never heard of Tommy Doyle except on that occasion, but no doubt he was one of the same crew, and anyway Hobson was always mentioning people of whom no one had ever heard, as though they were household names.
You may very well ask why I was on Hobson’s side in all this. Well, basically, I regard advertising as the most obnoxious manifestation of a capitalist system, and while we continue to live under such a system I will fight advertising in every way I can, which is to say by giving my unflinching moral support to anyone who has more courage than I in denouncing it. I see no reason, I might add, why smug young men should be allowed to sit on their well-tailored behinds in London and decide what we all want to buy and how we want it to be wrapped up. The whole thing is a fraud, anyway. Whoever changed his brand of toothpaste because he saw another one advertised? I have used the same brand as long as I can remember, I have stuck with it through various abominations, through peppermint, chlorophyll, and everything else, and I don’t ever intend to change. Not that I like it particularly, but because I am sure it’s just as bad as the others, and why should I change? Advertising is, in my opinion, obtrusive, immoral, offensive, tasteless, undesirable and all the rest of it. So I was on Brigadier Hobson’s side.
I sat and listened to the old boy, admiring the effortless way in which he disguised his real motives behind some brilliant claptrap about patriotic duty. He must have been the only man in Cartersfield who didn’t realize that his only objection was that the billboard was so close to his drive.
‘I’m glad we agree about this, Drysdale,’ he said, and his eyes grew cloudy for a moment, no doubt thinking of some of the major issues on which we had clashed in the past—the bus-shelter, for instance, and the new public lavatory. I was thinking myself about how nice it would be to get back into opposition again. Hobson managed to make me feel like his batman when he spoke to me, and I am not, I like to think, the batman type.
He went off without accepting my offer of a third drink, but I stayed and had a chat with Sam. As a landlord, Sam hears every side of every question, and never gives an opinion, though it’s usually quite clear what he thinks.
‘Jack says the Brigadier can’t touch him,’ he said, polishing a glass in rather a detached way, as though he knew all the answers but didn’t want to embarrass me with them, since I might not find them to my liking.
‘Don’t tell me you’re on Jack’s side, Sam.’
‘I don’t take sides,’ he said, still polishing. ‘I’m in trade. I don’t mind an advert. Cheers the place up. Outdoors is different, perhaps. I haven’t thought about it.’
This meant that he was on Jack’s side. And he had a point, I suppose. His bar would have been a very dreary and dank place without those Schweppes girls and Guinness animals all over the walls.
‘What do you think will happen?’ I said.
‘It’ll all die down in a week or two,’ said Sam. He nodded at the bottle of sherry. ‘Ever tried that stuff?’
‘I hate sherry. The headmaster always serves it before dinner. Not that he asks me more than twice a year. It turns my stomach.’
‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘he’s a pretty sour man, the Brigadier. I don’t reckon that stuff helps him any.’
‘I dare say it doesn’t. Cheers, Sam. I must be going.’
‘Don’t be gone long,’ said Sam, automatically. I don’t know where he picked up the expression, but it’s one of the things that make me suspect Sam of having a doubtful past.
Thinking about the whole business, it seemed pretty clear that Sam was right, though, about Hobson’s inability to do anything. And as it turned out all his allies failed him. The CPRE let him down, Gwatkin let him down, the Member was away on a fact-finding tour of the grouse moors by the time Hobson’s letter reached him, there was no one left who gave a thought to the matter after about a fortnight. Except Hobson and me. Even Harry Mengel, who had been, for ideological reasons, strongly on our side to begin with, lost interest and went back to his shop and a girl called Joan Cartwright whom he was trying to seduce, in his usual impetuous way, by rushing her up to London a couple of evenings a week.
‘Hell,’ he said one morning, when I went in to get some cigarettes, ‘the thing’s bloody awful, of course, but it’s better than a petrol station. Jack Solomons would put one up like that if someone suggested it to him.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said, ‘don’t even suggest the suggestion. Hobson would have a heart attack.’
‘Well,’ said Harry, unsympathetically, ‘he is getting on a bit, isn’t he?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘I know it isn’t,’ said Harry. ‘Look, I’ve got more important things to do than natter with you all day. Do you want these cigarettes or not?’
So there we were, Hobson and I, an island of decency, as it were, in a sea of indifference, and I knew that at any moment the issue of the carnival would come up, and then we would return to our usual positions of hostility, our little island neatly partitioned. There was talk of putting flags out across the streets, an idea which filled me with horror and disgust, but which was certain to appeal to all the worst in Hobson. You only have to mention the queen or the flag and he starts stiffening his back, and if you’re lucky you can see the lump bulging in his throat. We have our carnival in the middle of September, and a splendid thing it is, in a way, with everyone turning out and trying to be polite to each other, and an atmosphere of calm self-content. But recently there had been an attempt by certain dastardly commercial interests to widen the scope of the thing, to turn it into a county affair, generally to muck it up. And I have always been of the opinion that Cartersfield is a much nicer place when it keeps to itself, that men with blonde women don’t add to the town’s attractions, that any attempt to bring in visitors undermines the whole ethic of the place. I am, you might say, a Little Cartersfieldsman. Flags across the street seemed to me then, and seem, for that matter, now, a desecration and worse still, only a beginning of something much worse. Besides, I detest flag-waving and any other form of hysterical patriotism. If a great victory has been won a small flag may not be out of place, but to deck the narrow thoroughfares of Cartersfield with bunting just for the sake of the carnival is absolutely absurd. On this, though, Hobson couldn’t be trusted. Almost certainly the thought of flags would blind him with patriotism, and creeping commercialism would have crept another few inches. So I didn’t think our pact would hold up very much longer, since it was now the middle of August, and the question of bunting would come up at the next meeting of the Carnival Committee, of which he was chairman.
One evening about that time, when hope seemed gone for good, Hobson took the totally unprecedented and dangerous step of asking me to dinner. This was meant to be, I suppose, a mark of great honour, since they hardly ever entertained except on an exchange basis with other ex-officers and their wives in the neighbourhood, and certainly never undistinguished schoolmasters such as myself. I pondered a bit before accepting, and finally did so with reluctance, mainly because I wanted to know what the inside of his house was like. Mrs Hobson’s cooking, it was widely reported, did not go much beyond iron rations, with a strong emphasis on corned beef, and since there was no conceivable way in which I could return the hospitality, the whole thing was deeply embarrassing. However, banking on a rupture of relations in the near future, I put on the unworn suit which Jack Solomons had sold me and set off to Hill Crest, the Hobson home.
As it turned out, the popular estimate of Mrs. Hobson’s cooking was pretty accurate. She gave us what seemed to be mutton stew, in which I searched with less and less hope for something more edible than parsnip, my most detested vegetable. Hobson was very gloomy that evening, and chewed away to himself, so I had to try and talk to Evangeline, who was wearing a high-necked bottle-green dress, and whose hair still wasn’t quite grey enough to make her as distinguished as she no doubt hoped. The general festivity of the occasion can be judged by this sample conversation.
‘Are you a gardener, Mr Drysdale?’
‘No, Mrs Hobson. I have never much cared for flowers.’
‘I suffer from hay-fever.’ (This was a lie, of course, but I felt I had to make some excuse for my blunder.)
‘I hope you don’t mind the roses. Do they bother you?’
‘Not at all, not at all.’
‘My sister has the same trouble. She lives in Kent, you know. She surfers appallingly, she says, during the hop-picking season.’
‘She never picked a hop in her life,’ said Hobson, startling both of us.
‘Really, dear, I didn’t say she picked them herself. I simply said she suffers terribly from hay-fever in the picking season.’
‘Terrible people from London go down and pick ’em,’ said Hobson. ‘Frightful job.’
‘I believe it’s very hard work,’ I said.
Hobson chewed for a moment, then said ‘Hops’ with great bitterness.
Well, as you can imagine, that ended that conversation, and the evening trailed on in much the same way, with me glancing covertly at my watch, Mrs Hobson doing her best to find some common topic, with a total lack of success, and Hobson treating us both as though we were junior staff-officers at the dinner-table of a famous general. And I simply couldn’t eat the parsnips.
However, after dinner things cheered up a bit, mostly because Mrs Hobson pretended she had to do the washing-up, thus leaving us together with some whisky. Why she made the pretence I really don’t know, since everyone in Cartersfield knows exactly who works for whom, and it is no secret that Mrs Badham comes in every morning to do Mrs Hobson’s housework for her, but I dare say the poor woman wanted a rest after her conversational labours. Anyway, there we two sat, looking at the unlit fire and wondering when the winter would descend and whether it was really correct to say it had ever left the previous April. Although the outside of Hobson’s house is impeccably Victorian, even to the extent of having a turret, inside it’s the most horrible mixture of styles. The great tragedy of the Hobsons’ lives was, and still is, their son Hubert, who is never mentioned. He was, however, still mentionable, and perhaps even lovable, though it is hard to believe it, at the time the Hobsons retired and moved into Hill Crest. Hubert was then about twenty-five, as far as I can remember, and he had already appalled his father by keeping out of the war on account of flat feet or asthma or one of those dodges. In the way that only really nasty young men do, he had gone into the interior decorating business. The interior of Hill Crest was one of his earliest creations, and he had, no doubt, done his best, which was simply awful. What with Regency wall-paper, William Morris chairs, pouffes all over the place, velvet drapery and chi-chi by the ton, he must have cost his parents a good deal of their capital, and I must say that if I had been Mrs Hobson I would much rather have spent the money on a good cook. No two walls were the same colour, and most of the chairs were designed for a human buttock a good deal smaller than is normal and decent. Poor old Hobson, who would have been much happier in something simple, like a dog-kennel, moved round the house with an air of great distress. But his wife made what can only be called a sporting attempt to live with it, and by the time they’d decided the thing was really too hideous to endure they could no longer afford to have it put straight again. In fifty years’ time, perhaps, Hill Crest will be sought out by connoisseurs, but definitely not at the moment.
Well, sitting in the ‘den’, which was more like the dressing-room of one of the seedier kinds of chorus-girl, but which Hobson had tried to make habitable by adding pictures of his regiment sitting with folded arms, cartoons of himself in his polo-playing days, culled, I am sure, from regimental magazines, and even a snapshot, much enlarged, of what appeared to be Monty ticking him off very sharply—sitting there, with his past on the walls, Hobson became slightly less gloomy.
‘I’m damned if I’m beaten yet,’ he said, sucking hard on his pipe, which immediately went out. He tried to light it again, burning his fingers with monotonous regularity, the grate slowly filling with matches. Watching him, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. But at the same moment Hobson had his.
‘I’ve got it!’ he said, and let his pipe alone for a moment. ‘I’ve got it, Drysdale, by God if I haven’t!’
‘What?’ I said.
‘I’ve got the way to dish that fellow Solomons. Can’t think why it never occurred to me before. A night manœuvre. Are you game?’
‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘What is the plan?’
‘We simply go and chop the damned thing down. Chop it down and take it away. Throw it in the gravel-pit lake.’
‘I don’t think you can really get away with that,’ I said. ‘It sounds a bit too much like John Buchan to me.’
‘Damned good writer, Buchan,’ said Hobson, looking at me suspiciously. ‘Met him once. Awfully nice chap.’
‘I dare say he was,’ I said, ‘but you still can’t go round destroying property. There are laws against it.’
‘Ah,’ said Hobson, ‘but you see they’d never suspect me. They’d think it was those Teddy boys from Slough.’
‘Brigadier, I’ve never heard anything so immoral in my life.’
‘Never cared much for morality,’ said Hobson. ‘Not my line. Always liked men with some guts. Never liked sending people to the colonel just because of a bit of high spirits. Hated having to deal with defaulters. Got to have discipline, of course. But there’s no point in sending a man to jail just because he has high spirits.’
Well, as you may imagine, I was more than a little taken aback by this side of a man who I had always supposed hankered to be made a magistrate. His idea had excited him, he looked positively happy.
‘By God,’ he said, ‘I’ll show that Solomons.’
I’d never felt sorry for Brigadier Hobson before, but I did now.
‘Now come, Brigadier,’ I said, ‘you know as well as I do that you can’t go and chop down a billboard in the middle of the night. You’ll be fined. You’ll be the laughing-stock of the whole town.’
‘Do you really think so?’ he said. Underneath all his bluster and beefiness, I decided, Brigadier Hobson was just another child who has never grown up. I teach children, so I know what the percentage is, and it’s a lot higher even than you might think. Now he looked like a schoolboy cricketer in the rain. But I can’t feel sorry for Hobson for very long, and anyway I had an idea of my own, and furthermore I suddenly saw how I might bargain with Hobson, my idea for his support against carnival bunting.
‘I have an idea,’ I said, ‘which, if you will forgive my saying so, is better than yours, Brigadier. But first, let’s talk about the carnival.’
‘The carnival?’
‘You’re chairman of the committee, aren’t you?’
‘I am, yes. What is it?’
‘I expect you’ve heard that certain people, and I needn’t name them, but they are mostly tradesmen, people like Solomons, in fact, though he’s not actually one of them—certain people are planning to turn the town into a sort of coffin this year. You do put a flag on a soldier’s coffin when you bury him, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Drysdale, we do.’
‘Now you and I would agree, I think, that the carnival is an excellent thing, but it ought to be kept in its place, that’s to say Ponting’s meadow.’
‘Of course,’ said Hobson, ‘Ponting is very decent about it.’
‘And we’d agree, too, that we don’t want Teddy boys and hooligans coming to Cartersfield and turning the place upside down, just because we’re having a carnival. We don’t want them smashing up the Flower Show as they did at Blockley last week, do we? We like a roundabout, but we don’t want any skyrockets in Cartersfield.’
‘Skyrockets?’ said Hobson, horrified.
‘They’re extremely noisy things that whizz round,’ I said, not wishing to enlighten him too much. ‘If we’re to keep that sort of thing out, Brigadier, if we’re to keep Cartersfield’s carnival for ourselves, we don’t want to fill the streets with flags, do we? Everyone passing through will think it’s a World Fair. Our carnival must be kept strictly for ourselves.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Hobson. ‘A World Fair?’
‘Well then, I can rely on you to veto the suggestion of flags.’
‘Now wait a minute,’ said Hobson. ‘I don’t see anything wrong with flags.’
‘It’s the first step, Brigadier, the first step.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear your idea about Solomons.’
‘I must feel I have your support on this matter,’ I said.
‘Blackmail,’ said Hobson, ‘sheer blackmail.’
‘Well, if you don’t like my idea, you needn’t support my notion of keeping Cartersfield clean,’ I said.
He looked at me angrily. ‘Let’s hear what you’ve got to offer.’
‘It’s very simple. Solomons’ billboard is about six feet his side of the fence. You build a billboard of your own, right up against the fence, and you’ll block his out completely. And on your billboard you put whatever you like—“HELP STAMP OUT BILLBOARDS”, for instance. Then let him see what he can do.’
Hobson looked at me for a full minute, then he said: ‘I’ve got to give it to you, Drysdale. That’s an absolutely first-class idea. Absolutely first-class. I’ll do it tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow is Sunday.’
‘All the better. I think I know some chaps who don’t mind earning a little extra money by working on Sunday.’
‘Well, it’s your billboard,’ I said, ‘you do what you like. But I hope I can rely on you to quash the flag nonsense.’
‘Of course, of course,’ he said, ‘you’re absolutely right about it. Have another drink.’
We’d just got settled again, and he was beginning to expand on some of the pranks he’d been up to as a young man, when his wife came in.
‘Evangeline, Drysdale here has just given me the most brilliant scheme for getting that damned billboard down. We’ll build a sign ourselves, slap bang in front of it.’
She looked at him as though he was mad, and then at me, accusingly. Then she said: ‘Did you feed the cat?’
‘Cat? No.’
She went out again.
‘Always on about that damned cat,’ said Hobson.
Well, though I have occasionally regretted helping Hobson, things turned out exactly as I had planned. It was one of my greatest political triumphs, and no one but Hobson knew whose idea it was. He built his sign in front of the adolescent with the comb in his hand, and Jack Solomons was furious and threatened to go to court, but he was as powerless as Hobson had been, and eventually the sign came down, though not before Mr Richards had had an interview with Brigadier Hobson that left him looking sadder than ever. The day after Solomons took his sign down, Hobson removed his. Neither has spoken to the other since, needless to say, and, equally needless to say, Hobson soon convinced himself that the idea was his in the first place.
He was loyal to his word, though, about the flags, and having been a chairman for a good many years he was able to get his way without anyone quite knowing how. The day after the committee met he rang me up.
‘There will be no flags,’ he said.
‘Thank you, Brigadier.’
‘I must tell you, Drysdale, that I think you behaved none too well about this matter.’
‘I must tell you, Brigadier, that but for me you would now be the laughing-stock of the whole neighbourhood, and possibly even in jail.’
The conversation didn’t last much longer, but it left us where we’d been before the whole question of billboards came up, that is to say in outspoken opposition. As I say, we don’t much care for change in Cartersfield. But it looks as though the question of bunting may come up again this year, and I don’t know quite where to find an ally. I may even be reduced to suggesting to Hobson that I may have to suggest to Jack Solomons that his field would make a splendid site for a petrol station. But I may have to admit defeat. I rather enjoy defeat, it puts one in such a strong position if anything awful happens. And so often it does, very satisfactorily. My only regret about the whole billboard issue was that I stopped Hobson chopping the bloody thing down. I’d give anything to see that man in the prisoner’s dock.