Fraser said: ‘What about the Lyke Wake Walk in November?’
Henry and I looked at each other knowingly.
It’s a thing you have to watch with Fraser, this question of dates. Most ordinary mortals, as you know - the you’s and me’s of this world - carry around through life a handy little booklet known as a diary, into which they write whatever they may be doing in the future. Then, as each day comes along, they can put their nose round the corner of the page to see if they are supposed to be up to anything or whether they can go back to bed again. And if it’s an expensive type of diary they can get all sorts of extra information on how to convert hectares into roods and whether it is a public holiday in Jakarta. That is how people’s timetables are planned.
Not Fraser’s.
Fraser is one of that other band of people who run their timetable on what is called the Navigational Principle. The Navigational Principle involves no paperwork at all. The single technique is to seize on any appointment which falls within one’s mental horizon and keep it to the minute, while other more distant events are given a wide berth, lost in the fog, thrown overboard, or allocated to a time so remote that nobody can seriously expect you to stick to them anyway.
That was why Fraser suggested ‘November’.
That was why Henry and I looked at each other knowingly.
We were talking about a holiday. Fraser said he was exhausted and needed a break. Not only that, but his future programme was so full that if we couldn’t grab the opportunity within the next few days we would have to count him out till ‘November’.
Henry said he was exhausted too, but since he was treading the boards in the local production of Blithe Spirit the week after next, any idea of slipping off was quite out of the question for the next fortnight or so. (All this, of course, was nothing more than theatrical bluff on Henry’s part. Henry wasn’t treading the boards and never will. What Henry was doing was Stage Managing, which - as he interprets the role - involves nothing more than hanging around the dressing rooms telling all the performers that it’s nothing like as funny as the Russian tragedy they did last year.)
I also was exhausted. But I rose above this quibbling over departure times: ‘At least,’ I said, ‘we’re all agreed on one thing. A holiday is sorely needed.’
I must say, one isn’t looking for applause and back-slapping from one’s friends when one makes a simple man-to-man remark like the one I had just uttered. An approving nod, a fish-like waggle of the wrist is quite enough to show that old companions are on the same wavelength. What one has no right to expect is a sarcastic clearing of the throat and an ‘Oh ... ah ... um’ from Fraser, and one of those maddening, mindless cackles of a laugh from Henry as if to say ‘Go on - pull the other one’.
I knew what they were on about of course, and it’s a lie which I shall nail to the floor if I have to live to be a hundred to do it. They were the busy ones - that was what they were thinking; I was the slacker. They did their eight hours grind a day. I dawdled my time away in listless sybaritism and ease.
It is one of the crosses you have to bear when you become an author that nobody believes you do any work at all.
‘Sorry we can’t help you change your tyre,’ Henry and Fraser will say as Mrs Wilby from the post-office runs over the same rusty nail for the third time in a week. ‘We’re off to work. Try T,’ they say. ‘Old T will give you a hand.’
‘But isn’t he busy as well?’
‘Who - T? Busy?’ they will murmur with smiles. ‘Oh, no. T’s not busy. He has nothing to do. Just lolls around all day with his feet up. Between you and us he’d jump at the chance of having something to keep him occupied.’
I’d jump all right. Jump with anger. Fraser and Henry may find it amusing to describe my working stance as ‘lolling around’, but they know perfectly well how unfair that is. What I am doing, of course, is adopting an attitude of maximum concentration, poised to snatch at any idea which may happen to float by me in the course of the day. The posture is critical: feet up, so as to increase the flow of blood to the brain where it is most likely to be needed, eyes closed to sharpen the senses, hands behind the head so that I know where to find them if I have to write anything down suddenly.
I have known authors who can stretch out, apparently unconscious, in front of a radio set and then wake up and remember whole monologues from Edward Heath on the need for interface with the Third World. I’ve even heard of one who can say the monologues backwards and make them seem just as meaningful as they did the right way round. That’s concentration for you - and you don’t need me to tell you that you can’t reach that pitch of perfection without a lifetime of training and self-discipline. It’s all too easy for a young writer nowadays to abandon himself to frivolous pleasures and simply fritter his time away in changing car tyres, taking the children to school, rodding out drains, doing the washing up, and generally listening to the thousand-and-one siren voices which would lure him away from a life of dedication and hard work - I’ve done it myself in my time. Now I know better, and any indulgence of that sort is strictly kept back for the proper place and time - Easter Bank Holiday Monday in my book.
I had an object lesson in concentration at quite a young age. It was just after I had left university, when I did two or three months in an advertising agency as Personal Assistant to the Chairman, Sir Hector Botulus. Sir Hector was an important man in his profession, and he had risen to such a position of eminence that he was able to devote almost the whole of his time to thinking. The partner who interviewed me for the job told me that they preferred it that way, and on no account was I to bother Sir Hector with mundane business matters.
Sir Hector Botulus would often start thinking as early as eleven o’clock in the morning and carry on right through lunch without even a break for a sandwich. In the afternoons he would go to his club for a couple of hours, and then he would reappear in the office around five o’clock for a quick think before the chauffeur drove him home.
When I look back on those months which I spent with Sir Hector, I often kick myself at the chance I missed - the chance of learning from him, I mean. There was a man who had developed the art of meditation to a point which has seldom been matched, and yet I, his Personal Assistant, could find nothing better to do than give myself up to idle and irrelevant pursuits around the office. In the morning I would go through the mail with his secretary and dictate the replies for her to sign on his behalf. In the afternoons I would annotate the Association reports and paste up his press cuttings in a big folder. I even urged the partners to let me attend board meetings on his behalf. I said it might ease his load and give him a better idea of what had gone on than if he were present himself.
One day a phone call came through from the Westbury Hotel which the secretary passed on to me. It was the President of a huge American liquor group, who said that he had decided to move part of their promotional budget to Britain and he wanted to talk the whole project over with our firm. He said he was not prepared to discuss such a substantial sum of money with anybody less than the Chairman, and could I give him a time when Sir Hector would be free.
When I reported this potential new liquor account to the partners it threw them into a state of alarm. Some of them said there was nothing to lose. Others said it was the thin end of the wedge and if the Chairman started getting involved in the company’s business there was no knowing what would become of them all. They even thought of sending the Deputy Chairman along to pose as Sir Hector, but the legal partner advised caution. He said he had heard of something called the Advertising Code of Practice, and although he was sure that gross deception would be perfectly all right there was always the off-chance that somebody might make difficulties.
In the end they agreed to the meeting with Sir Hector, and they told me to take full notes. They told me it would have to be as early as possible, before Sir Hector had started thinking for the day, and so at ten o’clock the following morning I met the American on the steps to the office and led him into the boardroom to see our Chairman.
The main object of the American President’s visit turned out to be the creation of a promotional campaign for a new brand of port which was to be sold in the Caribbean market. The brand name, he said, was to be Surfing.
‘Port is the new fun drink in the Caribbean,’ he told us seriously. ‘Port is beach parties. It is go-go. It is skin-diving and barracuda time. You can drink it long with tonic or ginger. You can mix it. You can bubble it over a whole mountain of olives and tree-ripened limes. You can take it with bourbon ...’
‘Or neat,’ said Sir Hector suddenly. It was the first utterance he had made in the whole interview.
The President sat up as though shocked. ‘Neat?’ he said. ‘You mean straight, on the rocks?’
‘No,’ said Sir Hector.
‘You mean ... straight? Just - straight!’ exclaimed our visitor. The idea that you could pour the stuff directly from the bottle without diluting it with anybody else’s product seemed to come to him as a revelation. That was the sort of fresh, original thinking that got the British promotion industry its reputation, he told us, and an hour later he went back to his hotel and sent round two cases of Surfing port and a six-figure contract to come up with a ‘total promotion concept’. Sir Hector met the consignment in the lobby when he returned from his club in the afternoon, and he announced that he would be handling the account himself. ‘Bring the samples to my office,’ he said.
From that moment until the point a month later when Sir Hector was lured away to become marketing consultant for our American principals at an undisclosed salary, the partnership was in a state of tension I don’t think I have ever seen equalled. The fluted glass panel between the secretary’s office and the boardroom became the pivotal point around which the whole company’s activities turned. From early morning until the time Sir Hector was driven away each night, hardly a minute passed without one partner or another dropping in to stare with me at the zigzag, distorted image of the Chairman on the pane. Sometimes he could be seen swaying around slightly - contemplating the shape of a bottle, we thought, or perhaps holding the product up to the light to ponder on its colour. At other times he seemed to be totally immobile, often for hours together. Upstairs on the second floor an operations room was established, with copywriters and artmen standing by, ready to jump into action the moment Sir Hector had finalised his ideas.
At the end of a fortnight the partners couldn’t wait any longer. They said the anticipation was killing them, and they sent me into the boardroom to find out what the Chairman had hit upon.
Two weeks of continuous thinking had taken its toll of the old man. His eyes were red with lack of sleep, and he was so bound up in his thoughts that he could hardly bring himself to speak. The bottles he had been studying lay around him in heaps.
I stood directly in front of him to make sure he was aware of my presence, and after a minute or two he looked up and gave a grunt of recognition.
‘Sir Hector,’ I said, ‘the partners want to know whether you have identified a total promotion concept for the Surfing Port Account.’
He looked at me in a distant sort of way, as you might look at a pot-plant or a prize-winning documentary, and for a moment I thought I had lost his attention.
Then he spoke:
‘Shurfing’, said Sir Hector with difficulty. ‘The Port of Kingsh.’ And with these words he collapsed to the carpet and lay still.
It’s all history now, but that slogan ‘The Port of Kings’ literally conquered the Caribbean fifteen years ago. It was on hoardings and taxis. It was on radio jingles and T.V. commercials. It was even arranged and performed by steel bands to welcome Heads of State at local airports. But unfortunately the most instantaneous effect from my point of view was that it bore Sir Hector away, upwards and onwards to higher things, which meant that my own job came to an end.
‘I hope you’ve learned something while you’ve been with us,’ the administration partner said to me as we shook hands.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. But of course I hadn’t. Of course it was going to be years and years before the full significance of what I had witnessed really sank home to me.
And if it takes that long to learn it yourself, just think what an uphill struggle I’ve got convincing a couple of cloth-heads like Fraser and Henry who don’t want to listen in the first place.
At this point Penny came in from the next room where she had been ironing Fraser’s shirts. She said that hearing our bickering had made her wonder whether she had done the right thing. She said that she had met the De Veres in the village during the afternoon, the new people who have taken over the Hall. They told her they would like to meet us, and could we pick a suitable evening to go round. They weren’t thinking of anything elaborate, just champagne cocktails and some light supper, and they wondered whether Fraser and Penny could come, and that handsome friend of Fraser’s with the brown hair (Henry identified this as himself), and also that man who seemed to be at a loose end all the time.
Penny said she had accepted for all of us, but seeing that we couldn’t agree about one single simple date, perhaps she had better ring up and say no.
(It seems to me that some people have an odd way of issuing invitations nowadays.)
Fraser said that the critical point here was that the invitation had been accepted. How the hell we were going to comply with it was a different matter, but the effort would have to be made. He said that when his honour had been pledged he wasn’t prepared to see innocent people like the De Veres let down.
Henry said it was bloody inconvenient, but it didn’t do to be stand-offish towards neighbours. ‘I suppose we’d better go, hadn’t we, T?’
I said I supposed we had. ‘The big difference,’ I explained to Penny, ‘is that this is just one evening, not the best part of a week, which is what will be entailed in a holiday. A week takes more organising.’
‘Well, for heaven’s sake get on and organise it then,’ Penny said, going back to her ironing board.
Fraser lit his pipe.
‘You know the trouble with us?’ he said. ‘The trouble with us is that we are worrying too much about the time and not enough about the place.’ Fraser produces these flashes of sanity occasionally just to amaze his friends. ‘We should try lateral thinking,’ he said. ‘Tackle a different side of the problem and the original obstacles will melt away.’
I suppose it’s remarks like this which start the rumours off that Fraser is intelligent. In this instance he wasn’t just being sensible, but - as we were to find out within the hour - prophetic.
‘To get back to my Lyke Wake Walk idea,’ he said. ‘I only suggested that to get our brains ticking over. I don’t know much about the Lyke Wake myself, but a man in the office said it would be interesting to see it done.’
I said: ‘That sounds like a pretty lousy recommendation.’ And Henry said he agreed with me. He said the only part of it he approved of was the walk, and as far as the rest was concerned we could fry him in oil before he would go struggling twenty miles a day along the Lyke Wake - whatever that might be - on the say-so of some berk he had never met. He said he had seen too many holidays ruined in that way, and on his calculation 63.8 per cent of all the misery in the world could be attributed to well-intentioned enthusiasts sending weak-minded others off to places they had never seen.
Some people specialised in it, Henry said. In the 50s and 60s - and for all he knew in the 30s and 40s as well - his late uncle Gervase must have been responsible for more wrecked holidays than any man living.
‘Why don’t you try Bulgaria?’ Henry’s Uncle Gervase would cry to perfectly innocent bystanders who might be flicking through a brochure about Clacton while waiting for a train. ‘Some of the wildest scenery in Europe and all so cheap.’ And they would hurry off wondering why on earth the idea had never occurred to them before. And they would fly out to Bulgaria at the earliest possible moment and get themselves trampled underfoot by folk dancers and thrown into jail for swimming without a licence.
Henry said that his Uncle was once approached by some rather ineffectual people called Watson who asked him if he could give them a few tips about a holiday in France. They said that they had never been before, but they heard it was safe now.
‘With pleasure,’ he said. ‘Whereabouts in France are you going?’
‘Calais,’ they replied. It transpired afterwards that until they spoke to Henry’s uncle they thought that France was Calais. They hadn’t realised that it went on further.
‘Calais!’ exclaimed their friend scornfully. ‘Calais! A fat lot of enjoyment you’re going to get out of Calais! Have you thought about the Camargue?’
They said they hadn’t. Nor of course had Henry’s uncle until that very moment, but that didn’t prevent him from talking as though he were the world authority.
In those days, of course, the Camargue was even further off the beaten track than it is now. The landlord of the little hotel that Henry’s Uncle Gervase misled the Watsons into staying at couldn’t believe his luck at having a pair of foreigners under his roof, and the whole household came out to greet the taxi which trundled them the forty miles from Marseilles.
The Watsons were asked what they would like to eat, and they said some fish and chips would be nice.
‘Feeshes tonight!’ cried the patron, and the family all hurried indoors and started chopping things up for dinner.
Dinner, when it came, consisted of a species of local water- serpent, plainly cooked in garlic and a clear green sauce. The Watsons couldn’t touch a mouthful, and when no one was looking they slid the fish off their plates and into Mrs Watson’s handbag.
‘You lika ze feeshes?’ beamed the hotelier, trapping them on the stairs as they went up to their room. ‘Tomorrow I giving you cheeps. My wife’s brozzer he gotta one.’
‘Oh, really?’
Over the next fortnight the Watsons practically starved. On the second day - true to the landlord’s word - a sheep was brought in by raft from a relative’s farmhouse on a distant marsh. It was bleating horribly, and that night they were given its brains. The following evening they had a leg of mutton done nice and red and garnished with blackbirds, the night after that some small shellfish which Mr Watson said reminded him of gallstones, and so on.
The nearest village was seven miles, and there was no telephone in the hotel to ring for a taxi. If it hadn’t been for a packet of ginger biscuits which Mrs Watson had rolled up in a bath towel before setting out, they would have had to go without nourishment for the whole of their stay.
Apart from the lack of food, disposing of the meals which they didn’t eat became a nightmare for the two visitors. In the case of the water-serpents Mr Watson tried to flush his down the lavatory, but it swam back up again and had to be taken out. In the end they took to putting everything into an airtight tin trunk which was part of their luggage. They didn’t dare take it back through the customs, and on the morning of their departure they got up early and carried it downstairs - weak with hunger - and dropped it into the water.
Then they came home and told Henry’s Uncle Gervase what a marvellous time they’d had.
So Henry said to Fraser that he wasn’t prepared to be the raw material for somebody else’s holiday experiments.
I said the same.
Fraser said, apropos Henry’s story - which incidentally he remarked that he had heard before - he never had any difficulty in eating anything that was offered to him.
Henry said he never had any difficulty in eating anything that was offered to him either, and Fraser said that was the key to Henry’s problem.
‘But,’ said Henry, ‘it’s not likely to be a question of exotic food, but the lack of any food at all that is the trouble with these moorland walks. Food, and what is more important, drink. A drop of the right stuff, if you know what I mean.’
Fraser and I said we knew exactly what Henry meant, and we were grateful to him for pointing it out. We said a water-bottle was all very well in its way, but it was a big mistake to become a slave to the thing. As purists, we said, we regarded the water-bottle as strictly part of one’s survival kit. For normal drinking there should be regular sources of refreshment along the way.
Fraser said he had never actually had a bad holiday ever, but there was one which he spent in a Temperance hotel on Windermere which had on occasions been distinctly trying.
It’s an odd thing - I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it - but nobody will ever admit to having a bad holiday. It’s one of the little conventions of civilised life, rather like putting ‘Dear Sir’ on the top of a letter. The person you are writing to may not be ‘Dear’ at all. He may be the most villainous, time-serving specimen of a self-satisfied poltroon that ever bungled his way to notoriety, but still you call him ‘Dear Sir’. That is how the decencies of existence are maintained. And it’s the same thing with holidays. I could, if I’d wanted to, have taken Fraser up on his remark about never having had a bad one. I could have asked him some pretty pointed questions about that expedition he made last January when he took Penny and the children skiing in the Cairngorms.
‘I hear they’re a bit short of snow up there this year,’ I had said to him by way of encouragement as they set off. I knew this was true because I have a cousin of sorts who lives quite close to the place, and he sometimes uses the clubhouse to have a drink in the evening.
Two weeks later I had to ring my cousin up about something or other and I asked him how the snow was coming along.
‘Terrible,’ my cousin said cheerfully. ‘Mildest winter we’ve had up here for years.’ (He doesn’t ski himself, of course, so he was taking a macabre pleasure in cataloguing the discomfiture of everybody else.)
It seems that for the first week that Fraser and Penny were on holiday it rained a steady, soaking rain with the monotony of a bathroom tap. This gave way by stages to a warm westerly mist, and in due course to sunshine. Not that crisp, cold sunshine with frost on its breath, but a balmy, lethargic affair which brought all the hillsides out in a riot of colour.
It got so bad, my cousin said, that the skiers started to lay bets with each other as to whether there was any snow at all, and they sent a two-day expedition up into the peaks to see if they could spot any. The hotelier, who led the expedition in order to defend his establishment’s reputation, came back with a handful of snow in a thermos flask, but the skiers refused to pay out. They said he had manufactured it in the fridge.
When Fraser reappeared at the end of the month I asked him how he had got on.
‘Magnificent,’ he said. ‘Did you get our postcard?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Was it really as snowy as all that?’
‘I’ll say,’ said Fraser with gusto. ‘A bit light on the lower slopes for the first few days, which didn’t help the beginners. But up above it was perfection. Some of the finest ski-runs in Europe, if you ask me.’
Just then the miracle happened - or rather the answer to Fraser’s prophecy. Widget (my wife) and Katrina (Henry’s) rang up from home to say that Blithe Spirit had been cancelled. Joyce Wingham, the ex officio leading lady, had gone down with German measles, and Daphne - the nervous Number Two - thought she might be pregnant and didn’t want to risk it.
The news was received with quiet satisfaction at our end.
‘Have you any idea where we ought to go, T?’ Henry asked.
‘I have it on good authority,’ I replied, ‘that Offa’s Dyke is the greatest monument to the Dark Ages still visible in Europe.’
‘Ah,’ said Henry. ‘And how is it off for pubs?’
I said: ‘My last remark was not just spoken at a venture. It is a quotation from the foundation textbook Forty Good Pubs on Offa’s Dyke.’
‘Aha!’ said Henry and Fraser together.
It was getting on for ten o’clock, and Fraser called through to Penny to ask her how supper was coming along.
‘It’s ready now,’ Penny called back.
A glance of intelligence passed between the three of us.
‘Look, Darling,’ said Fraser, becoming ingratiating in a rather routine sort of a way, ‘would you like to keep the supper going for a while? I think we had better slip down to the Woolpack for a brief recap before we begin.’
‘In point of fact,’ Penny told us as we tugged on our Wellingtons, ‘I never put the supper on at all. I am starting now. Shall I expect you back at, say, 11.15?’