‘This expedition of ours,’ said Fraser as we walked along the road to the Woolpack, ‘will have to be mulled over in some detail. It’s going to be just like Three Men in a Boat.’
‘Except of course there won’t be a boat,’ said Henry.
‘Except for that,’ said Fraser.
‘And also there won’t be a dog,’ said Henry. ‘Remember, the real title is Three Men in a Boat to say Nothing of the Dog. We have no dog.’
‘Thank God for that,’ said Fraser.
Mrs Blenkiron keeps a very decent pint. It is cool and chewy and it focuses the mind quite wonderfully.
Henry said we ought to discuss the pros and cons of camping.
I said No. Not that I had any particular aversion to camping, but the conditions needed to be right for it. Camping with Henry, I may tell you, is a humiliating experience for everybody - except for Henry of course. Fraser says that in gastronomic terms it is rather like sitting down to a sausage roll on the beach and then finding that the Aga Khan is picnicking beside you.
‘Now we are really going to live rough,’ Henry tells his wife and children as they load every imaginable aid to comfort into the Volvo for him on the night before the expedition. ‘You packed the Malvern Water, did you, Annie, and the spare battery for my toothbrush?’
‘Yes, papa.’
And if you happen to be passing Henry’s house next morning on the way to getting a few groceries, you stop in amazement at the sight of all the luggage piled up on his roof-rack, and you begin wondering what it is you could possibly have forgotten that makes your load so much lighter than his. And when you get into the town you phone up your wife and make her read over the list of items to you again and again, and the two of you get wild with each other trying to think what you have missed off.
Then, after a while, you start to imagine that it is Henry who must have taken leave of his senses, and the idea strikes you as extremely funny.
‘Poor old Henry,’ you say. ‘He’s really dropped a clanger this time. He won’t get all that kit erected in a month of Sundays. What a laugh we’ll have when we see him struggling with that lot.’
And when you set out to drive to the camp-site in the afternoon the long journey is lightened by the thought that Henry will be stumbling round in the darkness when you will be safely tucked up in your sleeping-bags. Towards evening a drizzle comes on and that only seems to make the joke all the funnier.
The camp-site is crowded, but you manage to find a little niche for yourselves between a colony of ecumenical Germans and a large modern ‘canvas home’ which is so sophisticated it seems to have double-glazing. You start to unroll your tent, and the very moment you do so it dawns on you what you have forgotten - the groundsheet. Not only that, but you suddenly remember that you tucked the instructions for assembling the tent inside the groundsheet the last time you used it a couple of years ago so you’d know where to find them.
By the time dusk falls you have got the back half of the tent in place, but the front refuses to stand up. An irritating man in a mackintosh who has been watching you unblinkingly for the last twenty minutes tells you that it reminds him of a pantomime horse where the head-end has gone on strike, and he goes off to have his supper laughing at his own feeble joke.
In desperation you decide to take a tea-break and you huddle together round the methylated stove in the part of the tent which is actually standing and peer out from the soggy canvases into the rain.
‘No sign of Henry,’ you say to each other, clutching around for some sort of silver lining in the whole affair. ‘What a mess he’ll be in! Why, he’s got hours of work ahead of him - even if he can find a site, which seems unlikely.’
And then, just as you are talking, there is a revving of an engine and a pip-pip-pip, and Henry has parked his little red car beside you and is winding down the window.
‘Having a spot of bother?’ he enquires.
‘Bother?’ you say, beginning to smile to yourselves for the first time in ages. ‘Bother? Oh no, we’re all right. Just this moment arrived, as a matter of fact. We always like to have a quick cup of tea before we get really started. Why don’t the lot of us meet up for a chat in half an hour or so when we’re all finished?’
‘That’s the style,’ says Henry blandly. ‘Couldn’t get away in time to put the tent up myself, so I sent Katrina and the girls on ahead to sort it out for me. They’re staying with an aunt of mine for the night. Camping’s no activity for women. They can’t take the rough-and-tumble.’ And so saying he opens the door-flap of the canvas home next to you, flicks on an automatic hurricane lamp inside, reaches down his bedroom slippers, and subsides into an easy chair where he can watch you for the next two hours through his enormous picture-window.
The sight of Henry staring out at you unnerves you. While you were drinking your tea you had gradually realised that the long pole which is supporting the back of the tent ought really to be at the front, but now you are damned if you are going to change it round with him watching. Instead you construct a new front pole out of odd lengths of rod which are meant to go round the top of the walls, with the result that the sides of the canvas sag inwards like a deflated balloon. To keep them apart you tie one wall up to an overhanging branch and the other to the top of the German tent. The Germans hear you at work and they all come out and play their guitars at you and give you copies of the Bible, which you tell them you will read later.
Towards eleven o’clock Henry comes shambling over and asks you whether you would like to join him for some pate and toast before turning in.
‘Pâté!’ you exclaim with a distracted laugh. ‘Not for us, thank you very much. We’ve eaten. We were so quick about it you probably didn’t notice. We just heated up a can of stew and gobbled it down in a flash. Nothing like a nice early night when you’re camping, we always say.’
Then you crawl inside the darkened folds and feel about in the wet grass for a bag of tomatoes.
That is what camping with Henry is like.
Fraser said that nowadays you could hire special lightweight tents for walkers, and provided we got a single three-man job, Henry’s natural excesses would be kept in check. ‘Not that we’ll be under canvas every night, mark you,’ he said. ‘But it will give us the option to sleep out if we have to.’
I said, ‘What about the car? If we leave it at one end of the Dyke, it’ll be in the wrong place when we want to come home.’
Fraser said he’d already thought of that. He said you could bet your bottom dollar the girls would start yelling for a holiday too. ‘They can go to Wales on a coach and pick up the car at the other end,’ he said. ‘That will keep them quiet. They can use it to drive round Ludlow Castle and so forth and drop it off for us when the holiday is over.’
I said that perhaps they wouldn’t want to go round Ludlow Castle, but Fraser said that was nonsense. He said that in his experience all women wanted to go round Ludlow Castle and that any who didn’t must be suffering from a damaged personality and weren’t running true to type. He said that most of them wanted to watch performances of Milton’s Comus while they were there as well, but that wasn’t an absolutely fundamental characteristic of the species.
He said the journey to North Wales would take three hours. Henry said it would take three and a half. I said five.
I don’t know why it is, but some of the wildest exaggerations on this earth arise over the perfectly measurable question of how long it takes to get from one place to another. I sometimes think that if all the anglers who stand around in fishing hotels telling grisly half-truths to each other were to go down to Silverstone or Le Mans once a year and mingle with the motoring fraternity their capacity for barefaced lying would be very much improved.
I had a friend once who had been brought up in Sweden where the motoring code is so rigid that it’s best not to drive at all unless you have a police escort. My friend - his name, I think, was Djerk Hamstrung or something of that sort - came from a small provincial town where everybody spoke the truth all of the time and ate open sandwiches. Then, when he was about twenty-seven and beginning to grow up, his father sent him to stay with some people in Chipping Sodbury so he could see a bit of the world.
This was before the days of motorways, and my friend hired the latest little Ford to drive round all the important centres like Banbury and Stow-on-the-Wold.
Now, as it happened, the people my friend was staying with were working farmers who had to spend most of their time at point-to-points and eating-houses with others in the same line of occupation, and after he had been with them for a few weeks they told him one evening that they were going over to Newmarket the following day. They were going on business, they said, and would be away for a few nights, but he would be most welcome to pop over and join them if he cared to make it a day trip.
‘What sort of speed do you think you’ll average on the Newmarket run?’ said one of the farmers as they stood at the bar.
My Swedish friend knew the geography of England quite well from his schooldays, and he considered the question carefully. ‘I should think,’ he said, ‘that I could manage about thirty-two miles an hour.’
Then all his farming friends and all their friends fell about laughing. They said they always knew the English had a sense of humour, but they never realised the Swedes could be so deliciously droll. The barman produced a piece of paper and asked him to write the remark down, so he could pin it up behind the counter for other clients to read, and an old gentleman of about eighty at the end of the bar, who everybody thought was some sort of standing ornament, suddenly woke up and said, ‘What d’yer fill the tank with - lager?’ And this made them roar all the louder and start banging on the tables, and the old gentleman seemed to have some sort of fit, he found it so funny, and he had to be taken out into the night air and given brandy.
In the end the party all settled on sixty-two miles an hour as the fair mean for the trip, and they drove away and went to bed, saying they’d never had such an amusing evening in their lives.
My friend got up early the next morning and made his own breakfast. He had asked to be woken early, but everybody else thought that was still part of his joke, so they just lay in their rooms and wondered whether their men had started milking the cows. Over his coffee my friend studied a road atlas to see if there was some mysterious route to Newmarket that he hadn’t considered, but the more he pored over the pages the more puzzled he became as to why he was supposed to have got it so wrong.
Eventually, being a carefully reared young man, he decided that there was nothing for it but to stick to what he had originally thought. He set out by the most straightforward route, and stopped in Bedford for a quick snack and a stroll round. In Huntingdon he filled up with petrol, and he turned into the carpark at Newmarket just twenty minutes before the first race.
The other members of the party all appeared one after the other at around quarter to four. They had come by a variety of routes, but it seemed that each one of them had been held up for hours by a quite untypical series of traffic jams and burst tyres. If you didn’t count that, they said, they must have averaged seventy miles an hour each. They said that if it hadn’t been for their skill as drivers and their detailed knowledge of the country they might never have got there at all. They said the racecourse was particularly empty that day, which only proved that the ordinary, plodding motorists hadn’t managed to win through.
So I said we would start early, and if we found we were ahead of ourselves we could break our journey on the way. Henry said that would suit him fine, because he was planning to bring his binoculars for bird-watching.
By the time Mrs Blenkiron was calling ‘Time’, our schemes were beginning to shape up nicely. I should explain that the calling of ‘Time’ in our neck of the woods is a cherished custom which we wouldn’t for the world see discontinued. As a practice it is of unknown antiquity, and it is always accompanied by Mr Turner, the village policeman, moving his panda car from the front of the pub to the back. This is an important feature of the ritual, and when Mr Turner comes in again we show our respect for the ceremony by standing for a moment with our heads bowed before ordering another round of drinks.
Fraser said: ‘We won’t write down what we’re going to take with us. The size of the boot will make sure we don’t carry too much. What we will write down, however, is the things we must do before we leave.’ Fraser said it had been well observed - whether by Winston Churchill or by himself he couldn’t for the moment recall - that it was better not to travel at all than arrive at the other end and remember that you had left the cat locked up in the master bedroom.
Henry got out some paper and a chewed-off biro.
‘Mrs Drabble,’ said Fraser, ‘tell her to discontinue dusting the mantelpiece for two weeks.
‘That’s all that woman ever does,’ he added. ‘What Penny sees in her I can’t imagine. If I could get one pound fifty per foot of mantelpiece per week I’d retire from active work straight away.’
Henry said what about notifying the police that we were going, but Fraser said it was a waste of time. He said we could leave that aspect of the business to him, and by the time we left the pub he would make sure we didn’t get any burglars while we were away.
After ten minutes of thinking and Henry sucking at his pen to colourful effect and writing in a big round hand, we had our list of things to do before departing fairly battened down.
It read:
Mrs Drabble: not to dust mantelpiece
Ditto Mrs Hutch and Mrs Soames
Milkman
Newspapers
Tell GPO to continue not delivering the mail
Lawns: cut savagely with intent to blight future growth
Ditto Roses
Fraser’s answering machine: leave smooth infuriating message for callers saying he will be back in five minutes.
Penny’s hens: leave 7 days’ supply of fowl food to last until our return.
Henry said that this last item was ridiculous. He said you couldn’t expect the hens to measure out their daily rations and feed themselves systematically. They would only gorge like elephants for the first two days and then go hungry for the rest of the holiday.
Fraser said that that was their own look-out and it would teach them a lesson for the future. He said the economic truth was that it wasn’t the going away, it was the settling up afterwards with kennels and catteries and sweet old ladies who promised to keep an eye on your geraniums that drove the average holiday-maker to the brink of ruin.
He said that when he was first married Penny brought with her - possibly as part of her dowry, he couldn’t say - a pig called Esterhazy. He said he knew in advance that Penny’s family were dotty about animals, so he didn’t think anything more about it except when the wind was in the east and wafting in a direct line from the pigsty to the house.
When the time came round for their first summer holiday together Fraser suddenly thought of the pig. He asked Penny what they ought to do about it, and she said that old Mr Arkle from the village was supposed to have a way with animals and perhaps he could keep an eye on it for them.
Mr Arkle duly came up on the morning of Fraser’s departure. He was old and lacking intelligence and inarticulate, and he seemed just right for the job. After a series of initial misunderstandings the work was agreed on at an hourly rate, and Fraser and Penny drove away.
Fraser says that within a minute of setting out on holiday he had completely dismissed the cost of Mr Arkle’s labours from his thoughts. It seemed to him that whatever it came to it would be so little as not to be worth bothering about. In his mind’s eye he imagined that Mr Arkle would spend about twenty minutes with the animal each day, giving it here a bucket of water, there a panful of potatoes. Then the pig and Mr Arkle might have a short chat as between equals for a minute or two, and both would go their separate ways.
Just what made up Mr Arkle’s final bill of £68.50 Fraser never really found out. The crumpled invoice, with its single sum of money written in the middle, appeared oddly to be the work of several hands. But since no words accompanied the solitary figure, Fraser had to go and ask Mr Arkle to give him a breakdown. After several weeks of probing Fraser finally came to the conclusion that - apart from two sacks of expensive meal and a badger-hair pig brush - he was paying in the main for a series of cultural conversations between man and beast that must have extended to several hours a day.
Ever after that, Fraser said, he has made it a rule in his household that there are to be no hidden extras in the cost of any holiday: no hidden extras, and no policemen turning up at the house three nights after you’ve got back and shining arc-lamps in at you through the bedroom window, and then checking in their notebooks to see why they’ve got the wrong date, and asking you to identify yourself.
‘The way to deal with burglars,’ Fraser said, ‘is as follows. All you have to do is to say “Yes” in loud resonant tones in answer to every question that I feed you. Clear?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry and I pretty loudly.
‘Right,’ yelled Fraser. ‘So that’s our holiday fixed. We set out - what, in three weeks’ time?’
‘Yes,’ shouted Henry.
‘And we’ll be gone, I should think, for a good couple of weeks?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘What’ll you do with the Alsatian, Henry - put it in the kennels?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘I always do.’
‘And you’ll give the gardener a fortnight off, will you, T?”
‘I will,’ I shouted.
‘Fine! Then we we’ll have a last pint before we go please, Mrs Blenkiron.’
‘Now that,’ said Fraser as we strolled back, ‘is foolproof crime prevention. The only bother you’ll have is that two or three strange characters will turn up after you’ve got back and mutter something sheepishly about gravelling your drive.’
It took us rather a long time to make our way home. In fact, if we hadn’t been in the capable hands of Fraser, I could have sworn that he led us past the same house twice. Fraser said Nonsense. He said that the trouble with the age of the car was that people had lost all sense of the time it takes to make a journey on foot. He had noticed this himself more than once, particularly after dark. He said that sometimes when he stepped out of the Woolpack in the late evening the stroll home seemed to take almost twice as long as the outward journey; so much so that if he didn’t know better, he might have thought that he’d set off in the wrong direction.
The church clock was striking half past midnight as we turned in at Fraser’s gate. Penny was in bed, and a cold and distinctly frazzled-looking mixed grill was waiting for us in the kitchen. We fell on the charred components manfully.
‘It’s a funny thing about my wife,’ Fraser told us. ‘Penny can cook perfectly well when she sets her mind to it. But when it comes to timing she hasn’t the first idea.’