We camped for the night in the bottom of the Dyke. In the last mile or so before we stopped Offa seemed to have taken it into his head to shallow his earthwork out - perhaps the labour force wouldn’t agree to the overtime - and as we walked off across the fields in search of civilisation we could look back and see the orange top-ridge of our little tent from more than a mile away.
The sleeping-under-canvas decision was mine, and I very sensibly forced it on the others. Henry was for finding an inn that would put us up, but I told him it wasn’t practical. The whole idea of an inn, a Welsh or English inn, is a largely mythical notion foisted on to overseas visitors and weak-minded natives by the various Tourist Authorities. The very vagueness of the word ought to put us on our guard against it.
Britain offers two basic institutions to the traveller. One is the hotel, a place of computerised bills and unforeseen surcharges rightly avoided by every plain man in command of his faculties. The other is the pub, small, welcoming, much loved, and offering no accommodation. That ‘inns’ do actually exist, in the sense of pubs which have bedrooms for visitors as well, I won’t try to deny. But to wander out into an unfamiliar countryside and expect to find one when you need it would be an act of pure folly. They just don’t occur that often.
So it seemed to me that the putting up of a tent and the laying down of sleeping-bags would solve the accommodation side of the equation, and the finding of a pub would solve the eating and washing side - and, of course, the question of thirst.
I was looking forward to a Welsh pub. I said we might be able to join in some singing. Fraser said he would advise against it. He was second to none, he said, in his respect for my vocal range, and at breaking wine-glasses round the dinner table he would back my delivery against all comers; but musical people when they heard me might become unpredictable and violent. It was their artistic temperament.
Fraser said that because of our long-standing friendship and the deep affection and esteem in which we held each other, he knew I would take it in the right spirit when he said that my singing voice was one of the lousiest, loudest, flattest, most cacophonous imitations of gas escaping from a snapped-off mains that he’d ever heard. It was almost as bad, he said, as his friend B’s. In fact, he said, it would be interesting to put B and me in for a music competition just to see who came out bottom.
The tragedy about B, Fraser said, was that if people had only been frank to him about his voice in the first place he wouldn’t have got ideas above his station. Properly trained he might have made an excellent auctioneer or bookmaker. It all began apparently when he was idly flicking through the Standard one evening on his way back from work and he came across one of those dense closely-worded advertisements which are actually headed Advertisement across the top and then go on to tell you that there is an amazing new method that will enable you to get to grips with colloquial Icelandic, or the Oxford English Dictionary, or the oboe, in ten weeks starting next Saturday.
This particular advertisement was about singing. According to B, it asked all sorts of enticing questions about whether you could spare two hours a day to master Handel’s Messiah and sing the tenor solos at the beginning of next month. There was a letter from ‘Mr D.S. of Huddersfield (address supplied)’ explaining how this course had transformed his life, opening up new vistas of artistic appreciation and achievement which he had never before thought possible. Mr D.S. stated quite boldly that the time spent on the singing course would be ‘probably the most self-revealing three weeks you will ever spend in your life.’
It was the fact that this was only a three-week course that ultimately decided B in favour of trying it. Up to that time he had been wavering between two other courses, one on making candlewick bedspreads and the other on laying concrete; but as they both required ten weeks of study he thought he’d try his hand at something easier.
He wrote away for the course, and eventually it arrived. He did his first day’s practice and then came downstairs and sang his mother two verses of ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ and asked her to guess what it was. She said she thought it must be something to do with sheep-dog trials, but B wasn’t in the least put off. He told Fraser that his instruction manual had warned him not to be surprised if dull unmusical people were slow to respond to the progress he was making in the early stages.
B didn’t see much of his family in the course of the next three weeks. He normally did his practice in the mornings, and he noticed that most of the household would slip away on a variety of errands soon after breakfast and come back warily just before lunch so as not to disturb him. In the afternoons, when B would occasionally run over his daily lesson a second time just to make sure he had it licked, his mother suggested he might like to make use of the summer-house at the end of the garden, but his father said No - he didn’t want to lose the gardener. He said he was prepared to hire B a lock-up garage or an aircraft hanger, provided they weren’t near a centre of population.
Yet for all their sarcasm and evasiveness B’s family still stopped short of the sort of downright abuse which was what the situation really required. B was so enthusiastic about his own progress that he managed to interpret anything less than foul language or a blood-curdling oath as an actual compliment.
By the time his three weeks were up, B felt he had the subject of music mastered. He rang up the correspondence school and told them so, and the Principal said that this was quite usual but they could accept no liability for the consequences.
That afternoon B’s mother had two of her aunts coming to tea and B laid out one of his most advanced pieces rather ostentatiously on the piano to catch their attention. While his mother was in the kitchen setting the tea-tray, B nudged the sheet of music off the piano so that it floated down under the aunts’ noses, and Aunt Hermione picked it up and said that she would play the accompaniment if B agreed to sing it for them. B said he would. He said he didn’t normally give private performances at short notice, but as the ladies were so appreciative of good music he would make an exception in this case.
B’s piece was a sombre and passionate work Fraser said it was called ‘The Two Grenadiers’ and was by Schumann, neither of which bits of information means very much to me. It seems that to give the song its full impact it has to be sung in German, but that was no problem for B because the pronunciation of foreign languages had been fully covered in Lesson Five of the course. B said that the first few notes were for the piano only, a dark rumbling of foreboding, and then the voice entered alone with a melody of such ethereal drama that at the original performance many of the audience were weeping silently by the end of the first line.
This wasn’t quite the effect that B produced on the two aunts. When his moment came to sing, B filled his lungs and gave it all he’d got:
Nach Frankreich zogen zwei Grenadier
The noise that B made was so dramatic and unearthly that by way of reaction he received a moan like a failing gannet from the listening aunt, while Aunt Hermione started back from the keyboard and struck the wall behind her with her head. B maintained afterwards that it was the shock waves from this impact which brought down the engraving of ‘When Did You Last See Your Father’, not his singing. The shock waves from that (B said) had died away a full dotted minim of musical time before.
B’s mother heard the impact and came into the room to give assistance. To outward appearance the two aunts were none the worse for their experience. But their emotions were badly bruised, and no amount of cucumber sandwiches seemed to be able to effect a cure. They left early and went home muttering darkly about altering their wills, but fortunately they were too shaken to remember.
If B had only been told the truth by his family in the first place (Fraser said) this painful episode need never have occurred.
Fraser finished his account just as we swung on to the hard road that leads to the Llanbeder Arms, and by the time we had got inside the door he and Henry had made me promise not to get involved in any sing-songs on my own behalf. They said I could leave the singing work to them, but I might make my own contribution by beating time silently with a beer-mat. I agreed to do this. Not, you understand, because I am not capable of making up my own mind about singing - contrary to what Fraser was saying I sing a very passable light tenor. I agreed because I am a man of peace, and I am always prepared to refrain from argument in order to please a friend.
I don’t harbour grudges. That isn’t my way at all. But I must say, in view of Fraser’s wounding criticisms on the way to the pub, it was uplifting to see a certain justice at work in the way he made a complete fool of himself once he was in it. Music, fortunately, had nothing to do with the matter.
Fraser, you see, thinks he has a knack of getting on with the locals when he arrives in an unfamiliar pub. Actually, the only knack he has is for embarrassing everybody else in the room except himself.
As you know, it’s a proven fact that the locals in a country pub are impossible to get to know - at least for the first two dozen visits or so. These are the silent, sand-blasted men whose chief emotions on seeing you are disbelief and resentment. For a stranger to take the sign ‘public bar’ in the literal sense, meaning that he is allowed to walk into the place, seems to them to be playing with words, not to say exploiting a legal loophole - and they don’t like smart alecs.
Because of this feeling of being an intruder, most people of sensitivity and breeding have adopted a code of conduct which goes broadly as follows:
That is the way the gentleman behaves.
With Fraser it is different. To start with, so long as he is in England he will address his remarks to everybody in a manure-heavy Mummerset accent which brings all his friends out in a prickly rash. He doesn’t vary the dialect, either. I suppose, since it resembles nothing in heaven or on earth, it can’t matter very much that the same travesty of a rustic burr is used indiscriminately to, say, a Derbyshire shepherd, a Wiltshire farmer, or a Lincolnshire poacher, but one does expect people to be called by their proper names. It can’t help, one would think, to have random Christian names such as Bill, Alf and Fred simply allocated for the evening among the inhabitants at the whim of a man who has just that minute stepped into the bar.
Fraser normally starts by hailing the landlord. ‘Woy, zone me, Ned, if it baint a roight zedzy old noight out zere. Woy oi be zo barky oi could fanzy a drop of zat zere zbecial brew you bid oidin out ze back zere, for me and moi matez these lazt zix weeks an more, heh heh!’
Whereupon the landlord looks surprised and remarks that the chemist is closed at this time of night but he does have a bottle of syrup-of-figs upstairs if he thinks it will ease the pain.
On this occasion Fraser spoke Welsh, and it really was a show-stopper. We found out afterwards that the words meant something about peeling onions, but I suppose the fact that he’d got six words - any words - of Gaelic off by heart was a sufficient gesture in the direction of local colour from Fraser’s point of view.
Henry and I took our beer and cowered into a corner to watch, as Fraser sauntered expansively into the middle of the room. About sixteen other pairs of eyes were watching as well. Fraser selected a man in a cap who had been playing table skittles and - cursorily re-baptising him ‘Daffy’ - offered to buy him a drink. Without dropping his stare the man drained the beer down his throat and handed over his glass. Three other empty glasses appeared at the same time, and in the mugs around the walls there was a general lowering of beer levels. The feeling was beginning to spread around the Llanbeder Arms that they could be on to something.
When Fraser returned with the beer the man in the cap and two of his cronies converged and offered to play him a game of skittles. They let him win twice - that was before they started to bet on the result. After that, until Henry and I were able to prize him away from the pub at 11.15, he played nine games of skittles and lost every one. Sometimes they played him at singles, sometimes they would ask him to play doubles. Sometimes they would cruise comfortably to victory by a wide margin, and at other times they would let him get ahead and then creep up and overtake him at the last moment. And all this time Fraser actually imagined that he was making friends with them - making friends and improving his skittle-playing technique. ‘Give me another couple of games,’ he seemed to be saying unrepentantly to himself as we frog-marched him out into the yard. ‘Give me another couple of games and I’ll have got the technique sorted out.’ And, do you know, I actually think he believed himself.
We were followed away from the pub by a small black-and-white dog. It was a terrier type with a black patch over one eye and a tail which curled upwards like a boomerang. It trotted in and out of our legs tripping us up and gazing ahead in an intrepid-explorer sort of way, trying to give the impression that it had been with us for weeks. ‘Hello again, you lot,’ it told us, swerving nimbly away from a kick which I aimed in its direction. ‘It’s me. I’m back. Just had to break off for a couple of days to climb one of the local peaks but I’m back with you now. Been managing all right without me, have you? Oh good. Well, let’s get on with it then. No point in hanging around talking.’
We took the animal aside and gave it a piece of our mind. We told it we didn’t know it from Adam, and although we had been prepared to go along with its Walter Mitty fantasies for a hundred yards or so the joke had gone far enough. We said that real-life explorers like ourselves had been known to eat dogs when the going got rough, and the best thing it could do was go back home and dig up a bone and try to forget.
The message seemed to have some effect. From weaving around our feet like a bobbin, the dog first of all fell in line behind us, and then eventually stopped altogether. The last we saw of it as we turned off the road into the fields it was sitting down under the end lamp-post in the village staring after us. ‘And a fat lot of co-operation I got from you,’ was clearly written across its face.
I’m not normally in the habit of dreaming, but this particular walk seemed to bring on a year’s supply of dreams within the space of a few days. On the day we set out, if you remember, I had that dream about somebody shearing a sheep which actually turned out to be Katrina on the telephone. I can’t remember what I dreamed the next night - presumably something so terrifying that the good old subconscious got out its blue pencil and censored it. Then this night I had the very vivid idea that I was sleeping with a suitcase on my chest. It wasn’t just a straightforward leather or moulded suitcase either, it was a soft moleskin job which somebody had sensibly filled with small clockwork trains which were puffing in unison. What with the heat inside the tent and the weight of the suitcase on my chest, I was puffing quite a bit too; but whenever I tried to open the lid to tell the trains to synchronise their puffing with mine, the handle of the suitcase would uncurl itself and lick my nose.
All this seemed perfectly correct and sensible, of course - you know how it does. But it was when all the trains suddenly stopped puffing for a moment and instead the suitcase filled up with air and heaved an enormous sigh of boredom that the chain of rational events suddenly seemed to break and I opened my eyes to find a black-and-white dog of the terrier class fast asleep on my torso.
I say ‘fast asleep’, but actually it was more lying doggo, if that isn’t a pun. It had its limbs spread out in an attitude of repose - tail down, chin firmly tucked in between the front paws - but its eyes, when you looked at them, were watching me closely for the first signs of life. In fact our friend of the night before had now thrown off his intrepid-explorer role and was playing a new game of being the psychoanalyst who is bringing the patient out of his coma. ‘You have been in a deep, deep sleep,’ he was saying in his best bedside manner. ‘You have been in a deep, deep sleep, but now you are beginning to throw off your trance. Gently, gently, wakey wakey. Now, I am going to sniff three times and then I want you to open your eyes. Ready. Sniff... sniff... sniff. There we are!’ And then, of course, being only a dog and not a fully-trained psychoanalyst at all, he couldn’t disguise his amazement when I did actually open my eyes, and he leaped up on to all four paws, as though he had just seen a rat that needed jumping on, and began lathering my face with his tongue by way of saying, ‘Yippee I’ve done it.’
I threw the dog to one side with my elbow and it landed on the motionless form of Henry. Henry sat up abruptly and said ‘Whawazzatter?’, and the sudden movement of his body jerked it on to Fraser. Fraser, snoring loudly and without opening his eyes, somehow managed to pick the animal up quite deftly in both hands and sent it hurtling back across the tent to me. He judged the throw nicely in the circumstances, so that the dog faded away from my outstretched left arm and bounced off the tent walls back on to Henry’s face as he was sitting scratching his head and wondering what had hit him the first time.
By now the dog was bounding around our little bivouac in a series of rapid circles, and considering all the abuse and the footwear that were being thrown at him he seemed to be settling into the task of wrecking the homestead very well. Probably it was just the effect he had been hoping to achieve. One moment all had been peace and tedium, the next the world had emptied into a snowstorm of bloodcurdling oaths and misdirected punches and hiking boots. It was the sort of thing, he was telling himself, that you might have planned for months and months, and then never got within miles of it for sheer spontaneous confusion. Then, just as I had got him cornered by the door and was on the point of smothering him for good and all with a sleeping-bag, he wriggled backwards under the tent flap, ran off to a distance of fifty yards or so and lay down on his tummy to bark. He reappeared at breakfast - by which time we were all too exhausted and depressed to take the matter up with him - and joined the circle for a bowl of instant porridge and a slice of corned beef.
Wherever we went for the rest of that week, this dog went with us. I don’t mean by that that he was one of the party. Not in a regular sense. He had far too much on his agenda to spend his time strolling along the fields and lanes with the likes of us - relations to visit, insurrections and guerilla movements to get under way, action committees of the MCM (Maverick Canine Movement) to address. Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for whole days together; and then, just when we were beginning to forget about him completely, he would pop out at us from along the line of a hedgerow and fall in step for twenty minutes or so. ‘So here you are,’ he would say. ‘I wondered when you’d be catching up. Not getting along too fast, are we, but then I suppose we can’t expect too much from an inferior species. Well, it’s been nice talking to you. I’d like to stay longer, but you knew how it is - duty calls. Look, I’ll see if I can’t get back to you later in the evening. Either that or tomorrow morning. Sorry I can’t be more precise. I say - is that the time? Cheerio—must dash.’ And off he would go.
It was a foggy morning, with visibility down to about ten yards or so, and after breakfast Fraser and Che Woofera the dog disappeared into the mist and could be heard talking together. Henry and I thought it was one of those serious man-to-man conversations. Actually it was nothing of the kind, it was Fraser trying to shave with his new razor and the dog taking an active interest in seeing how the job was done. Together the two of them managed to produce a result like a porcupine in the moulting season.
There was a time, was there not, when the good old-fashioned razor-blade - I mean the standard Gillette or Pal razor-blade - was common bartering material throughout the known world. Some countries actually used them as coinage. Twelve oranges equal one razor-blade. Forty razor-blades equal one secondhand bicycle, and so on. Then somebody invented the electric razor, and the whole monetary system of the Third World was thrown into confusion. Panicking under the threat to the scratch-and-soap method of shaving, all the traditional razor-blade makers fell over themselves to invent their own new variation on the ageless theme of chomping the stubble from your chin. Single-sided blades, self-sharpening blades, built-in throwaway blades, double-headed swivel-topped blades, and so on and so on. The result, chaos. I am told that in the emerging world today you can’t pass on a razor-blade for love nor money. Worse than that you can’t buy the blade you need to fit the razor you got yourself in Worcester Park before you set out.
‘Shopkeeper, tell me, do you have stock of the K139 super-swivel razor blade?’
‘Yallaballala bingi-bingi. Thirty thousand Gillette bladies 1932 model. Very cheap.’
‘That is no use to me. It must be the K139 or nothing.’
‘Wama mama Q387 Extra Whizzer de luxe?’
‘No. K139.’
‘Skrapeorama D14, biddudda dudda?’
‘No, I tell you. No.’
‘Pikko pikko. Bakko bakko. Um Mburole on krumplawa bonga ki nwaloginda zutozumo powela um awapo.’ ‘What a ridiculous suggestion.’ ‘Bottla whisky?’
‘Of course not. I can’t shave with a bottle of whisky!’ ‘Perhaps not,’ says the shopkeeper, suddenly remembering his days at Oxford, ‘but it induces very desirable oblivion.’ The economic consequence is stagnation.
Fraser’s razor - (how’s that for an advertising catchphrase!) - Fraser’s razor I think was the K139. He can’t be sure about it because he had to tear the instructions off the back of the packet to get to the two free razor heads, and the dog swallowed them. I mean to say, he swallowed the instructions not the razor heads. Later in the proceedings he did in fact swallow one of the razor heads too, but he didn’t seem to enjoy it much and left the other one for shaving with, so that if only Fraser had had the instructions he ought to have been all right. As it was, all he could remember was a picture of a man looking glumly into the mirror with a shadow round his chin you could cut with a lawn-mower. Then the ‘after’ cartoon showed him gleaming unpleasantly and reflecting the sunrise like a chandelier. Exactly how he had fitted the head on to the razor to achieve this result, Fraser couldn’t for the life of him remember.
All this of course was lost on Henry and me. We could only hear the voices:
Fraser: Go away you brute!
Dog: Yurp, yurp!
Fraser: Well sit down then and keep quiet. Say nothing and do nothing ... Hey! Give me that! Give it here, come on! Come on now, there’s a good doggy. Open your mouth. That’s the boy. Open. Wider, Wider. Wider for Uncle-wuncle Frazey-Wazey. Well, stone me, he’s swallowed the bloody thing!
Dog: Yurp, yurp!
Fraser: Yurp yurp yourself and I hope it poisons you. Blast, I’ve cut myself now.
With all this chewing and swallowing going on Henry and I thought at first that the two of them might be passing messages to each other written on rice-paper. Later, when the curses and yelps took over, we wondered if they had been attacked by a rival gang and were having trouble keeping them at bay. And we particularly admired the way they finally reappeared from the fog, bloody but unbowed, and announced in the most matter-of- fact sort of drawl that they were ready to move off.