We had an odd breakfast next morning. We abandoned the omelette idea, and instead we turned out our hiking bags and divided all the eatables we found into six small courses. Fraser then made Henry write the items down, so that we could have a permanent record.
‘You never know,’ Fraser said. ‘This sort of information could set a whole new trend in menu planning.’
The list read:
Cup of Apricot Jam (each)
Bar of Chocolate or Irish Stew
1 Blood Orange or 5 Sugar Lumps or 2 Digestive Biscuits
Russian Tea
1/4 tin of Corned Beef or Lemon Meringue Pie
1 Boiled Sweet
Henry showed signs of panic as he saw the last of our supplies disappearing, but Fraser - who had been talking to some other people on the camp-site (not the Jacksons) - told him not to get alarmed. He said apparently there was a town called Knighton about three hours away to the south which actually sat astride the Dyke. We could stock up with groceries there. Speaking for himself, Fraser said, he also intended to find a restaurant or hotel and get himself a four-square lunch while he was on the subject. Henry and I could do as we liked.
It was amazing how this idea about lunch perked us all up.
Before Fraser raised the subject we had been looking on the day ahead as a sort of chore, some dreary uninviting task which had to be trundled through for the next eight or ten hours before the great concierge in the sky came round and said ‘Lights out’, when we could all get back into bed and go to sleep again. Now we couldn’t spring along fast enough.
It’s an interesting thing about walking - and I suppose it’s true about life as well - that provided you’re aiming at some sort of target you seen to have a great deal of incidental fun along the way. But take that target away and the whole thing becomes as blank and featureless as a swamp. That’s why, speaking for myself, I could never take up jogging. You’re not going anywhere. I should explain for the benefit of those readers who may skim through this book in two or three hundred years’ time and wonder what the hell I am talking about, that jogging is the latest in that long series of fashions that the civilised world has devised to prove to itself that meaningless tedium carries an extra-special virtue of its own. Every century has its peculiar form of disease. In the seventeenth century it was listening to sermons, in the nineteenth governing Australia. Now it’s jogging. Anyone - so the argument goes - anyone who can do anything so pointless and monotonous as that has got to be someone we can be proud of. And of course if you were to do an in-depth study of the thing, and research its history, you would find that all the spadework for the movement, all the getting it off the ground so to speak, was probably done generations ago by a whole string of super-bores who make the mere modish trendy of today seem practically effervescent by comparison. Karl Marx was a secret jogger. So was Matthew Arnold. Then of course you got D.H. Lawrence and Mahatma Gandhi and that lot. And before you know where you are they’re offering degree courses in the subject along with Social Studies and Applied Vandalism.
I only went jogging once and that was by mistake. It was when I had been in London a few months and I found myself sharing a flat with another newcomer to the city who was joining our firm on the same day. I should explain that this was in the late sixties, quite a few years before people were used to seeing joggers in this country; but my flat-mate had just completed a Business Management course in America where jogging was one of the principal skills they taught you, and I think he had some sort of missionary fervour about converting the United Kingdom.
My friend had learned something else at Business School which - looking back - I suppose was the prime cause of the near riot we created when we set out on our jog. He had learned to talk in a weird unearthly accent, which made about one quarter of everything he said quite incomprehensible. When I had got to know him better he explained to me one day that this method of speech was essential to his profession. He said that Americans were able to understand the accent no better than Englishmen, but anybody who couldn’t make the noise in the Business Management world stood no chance of rising to the top of the tree. He said that if he didn’t talk like that be would be ostracised by his colleagues and sent off to do studies on matchbox vendors in Worksop.
‘I suppose we’d better catch a tube in the morning,’ I said to him on the Sunday night before we signed on.
‘Uhuh,’ he replied, shaking his head - by which I understood him to mean No. ‘The - aw - arptimum route T is - aw — matrafact the - aw - No. 8 bus out of Saint Jan’s Wood which gives us a drarparff rightaround the - aw - Mansion House. Weidenwe take that?’
I said: ‘Fine.’ (I’m sorry, incidentally, that the ordinary common-or-garden alphabet can’t really do justice to the language of Business Managementese - but I hope you get the general drift of the thing.)
I said: ‘What time shall we set out?’
‘Eight aclerk,’ he said.
So we went to bed.
Now my friend had said eight o’clock - at least he said he’d said eight o’clock, but for some reason or other what I heard him say was a quarter past seven. We tried later on to reconstruct the two sounds to see if there was any way we could get them confused for each other again, but we never came to any firm conclusion. Our landlord complained that the experiment was upsetting the other residents of the house and we must either talk normally or get out.
Anyway, when I appeared from my room at about 7.14 and 30 seconds, allowing the usual half-minute for breakfast, I found him already going out of the front door.
‘If yore calming you’d bedder calm, T,’ he said. So I grabbed up my briefcase and ran down the steps with him into the street. We turned left and jogged along the kerb towards the traffic lights. There was nobody much about, but the man who had the paper shop four doors down leaped backwards with a start as we ran by and put his foot in the bucket he had been using to wash down the pavement, and two kids who had been playing about near the railings picked up their football and ran after us as though somebody had just told them where they could find a hidden cache of Mars bars.
‘Wotz this then?’ said one kid as they scampered along.
‘It’s yer Olympic afletes, innit,’ said the other knowledgeably. ‘This one ‘ere’s the aflete, see. An’ the uvver one’s ‘is lawyer wot’s guardin’ his amateur status and collectin’ all the bribes.’
The four of us ran on together for a little way. Then when we got half-way along the next street a small border collie suddenly ran out at us through an open garden gate, and he joined in the race with his master after him in hot pursuit; and then a witless youth who had been repairing his motor-bike by the side of the road suddenly threw down his spanner and started pounding along behind. Over the next half-mile or so our numbers swelled into double figures. Two housewives who had been abusing each other in a routine sort of way on the corner of a little square cast aside their antagonisms and attached themselves to the crowd.
‘Do you think it’s really him, dear?’ one of them kept saying to the other.
‘Of course its ‘im,’ the other said. ‘Recognise ‘im anywhere, I would. ‘E’s late for the studio, that’s why ‘e’s running.’
We picked up three or four more at the Cumbernauld Arms, where a group of brewer’s men were tossing barrels down on to the pavement; and the pedestrian crossing on Queen’s Grove doubled our numbers again at a single stroke. By the time we got on to the main thoroughfare at Wellington Road there must have been a good twenty-five people in the chase, and the policeman on duty outside Lords held the traffic up specially to let us through.
All this time, of course, I had supposed that we were running for a bus. I had been so preoccupied with keeping abreast of my flat-mate that it hadn’t occurred to me to look him over and see whether he was dressed for the City as I was. By the time we began the downhill gallop from Lord’s Cricket Ground to Maida Vale, however, his superior stamina-was beginning to tell, and with a quick spurt he ran ahead and came full into-view. I have always maintained, and I still do, that it was the sight of him in a lilac-coloured tracksuit and not the fact that I was weakened from exhaustion that caused me to veer suddenly from my direct path and crash into a lamp-post, thus bringing the whole expedition to a halt.
The policeman came running up and demanded to know what was going on. He received an alarming variety of replies. One woman insisted that we had all been running down to Queensway for the start of the summer sales,
‘Give over, duckie!’ cried a tall man in a waistcoat. ‘We’re chasing this dog here. It’s a Cruft’s Champion, see. You’ve only got to look at the hindquarters to tell it’s got class.’
A third said it was something to do with Nuclear Disarmament, and the two housewives insisted that my flatmate was Sean Connery and I was his keep-fit adviser.
They asked my flat-mate, but either they couldn’t understand him or they simply didn’t believe what he said. I suppose the idea that somebody could create a major incident by the simple expedient of jogging from nowhere to nowhere seemed too fanciful to be taken seriously.
In the end they all switched their attention to me. They sat me up against the lamp-post and slapped my face to make sure I was awake, and then they knelt down and peered at me and the policeman asked me what we’d been doing. I looked at him, and I looked at all the faces, and I looked at my friend who was still gesticulating wildly in a lilac-coloured sort of way, and I gave them the only answer I could.
‘I haven’t the least idea,’ I said.
I think if the policemen hadn’t been there the crowd would have lynched us. They surged around muttering menacingly, and a woman who had been calling out for some minutes that I was a Russian defector making a dash for freedom suddenly changed her tune and said that people like me ought to be pulled out of society and kept behind bars.
It took the policeman about five minutes to get the crowd to go away, and when he had us alone he took down our names and addresses and gave us an official caution. He said that no proceedings would be taken against us this time, but if we got ourselves into trouble again we’d have the full majesty of the law to contend with.
I took his advice, and I have never been jogging since. It seems to me that if the people who indulge in these hazardous sports would only stop and think of the trouble it causes everyone else when they get into difficulties, they’d give them up straight away and settle for something less risky, like hang-gliding.
I had a tune running through my head as we walked along, so I fell behind and whistled it quietly to myself - you know what a bad ear for music Fraser and Henry have. It was the one which goes tum-te-tum-tum tum-te-tum-tum tum-tum-tum-tum tum- te-tum-tum - I expect you probably know it. I whistled it for several reasons. First of all it was there - tunes have a habit of coming into your head when you’re walking, don’t they? In the second place it was a lovely day with a clear sky and a cool breeze, and it all seemed to fit in. And thirdly, when we were just about half-way through our morning’s stint I suddenly had a thought which started to worry me to begin with, but after a bit it seemed to be rather funny, so I thought I would keep it to myself until the right moment came. Then I would spring it on the other two and watch them beginning to panic. That made me whistle all the better.
Henry and Fraser had started off trying to tackle some sort of brain-teaser - the sort of thing I imagine they set you in intelligence tests. A man wakes up in the middle of the night and hears the Town Hall clock strike two. Now, he knows that the clock strikes the correct number of clangs on each hour, and it strikes once at quarter-past, and twice at half-past, and once again at a quarter-to. How long will it be before he knows for certain what the time is? Or something like that. The answer, of course, which you’re never allowed to give for some reason, is just as long as it takes him to pick up the telephone and dial the speaking clock. They argued so long, Henry and Fraser, that I was half expecting it to turn into a punch-up, but then when I listened to them again a mile or so further on they had got on to another subject, namely lunch, drink, and stocking up with food. And a few minutes later we came over the top of a hill called Panpunton Hill and there was the little town of Knighton lying beneath us in the valley.
Fraser and Henry sat down on a rock and started congratulating themselves. ‘There she is,’ they said to each other. ‘Now, the time is just coming up to 1.30, so we’ll be there by two. We can have a drink for half an hour and then go out and find something to eat.’
I decided to unleash my surprise. ‘You’re overlooking one thing,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’ they said.
I said, ‘Today’s Sunday. Closing time’ll be two o’clock, and you won’t find a cafe open for love nor money.’
I don’t know when I’ve seen two expressions change so fast. One minute they were swathed in complacent smiles, the next they were all anger and savagery and accusation. ‘What the devil are you grinning about?’ they shouted at me. And, ‘Don’t just stand there smirking - get a move on.’ And more terrible stuff which I would blush to relay. Most of it, I’m glad to say, was more or less hurled backwards at me as they pounded down the hill, and what with the banging of their boots and the wide range of vocabulary I couldn’t do much more than grasp the general meaning. Anyway, since I’d had plenty of time to adjust to the idea that we were going to be late, I was happy just to stroll downhill at an easy amble, keeping my eye on them as they hurried between the first houses and a moment later emerged to view in the High Street and dived into the Swan Hotel.
As it happened I was wrong. Sunday closing in Knighton is a good solid sensible 2.30. So Henry and Fraser had forty-five minutes drinking time, and I had half an hour. Then, by prior arrangement with the landlord, we went into the dining room and sat down to a late lunch.
There was one other party in the dining room of the Swan Hotel, but it was a large party of, I think, ten people. Nine of these were looking dismal and uneasy and boxed in. The tenth was looking extraordinarily authoritative and pleased with himself.
‘This is a surprisingly good claret,’ he was saying loudly to the waiter as we came through the door. ‘Really quite a robust little wine. Good afternoon,’ he said, raising his glass to us when we advanced into the room. ‘Your very good health, gentlemen.’
I said, ‘Good afternoon, Doctor.’
And Fraser said, ‘Good health, Doctor.’
And Henry said, ‘Cheers.’
Then we sat down at our table and turned our backs on him.
It silenced him - this calling him ‘Doctor’, I mean. Of course, he was a doctor, but - although I couldn’t see his face - I could sort of feel him wondering to himself how we had worked it out. The fact is of course, that we didn’t know for sure. We were just relying on the proven fact that about ninety-five per cent of all the people who can be found wrecking otherwise enjoyable meals these days by banging on about wine are in point of fact G.P.s, heart surgeons, consultant neurologists and others of that kidney. In the narrow circles in which they move a knowledge of wine passes for culture. That is why they are always trying to convince everybody else that they’ve got it.
Let me explain a little more. A doctor’s training is a hard one. He normally starts at the age of about 17, and after a four-year gap playing Rugby for the Harlequins, he finishes up being let loose on the patients somewhere between 45 and 50 when they’ve run out of any further exams that they can set him. All this time he is studying for papers, learning the difference between tennis elbow and beri-beri - that sort of thing. Then suddenly, when he is about half-way through the course and starting to get middle-aged, he wakes up one morning and realises that there is a whole world of enlightenment and artistic endeavour outside the walls of the hospital about which he knows absolutely nothing. It is at this point that he becomes a potential nuisance.
Now I have it on good medical authority that all doctors go through this period of self-realisation. The nice lazy ones, of course - the ones who finish up prescribing a pint of Guinness twice a day - soon learn to live with their lack of breadth; they do nothing at all about the deficiency, and spend the rest of their lives on perfectly good terms with everybody, even the surviving relatives of their patients.
The others, however, are different. They are the ones who hurl aside their black mood with a cry of impatience and decide to do something about it. Naturally, being men of science, they then fall into the trap of thinking that the problem can be resolved by some sort of self-set examination, and they cast around for a subject which can be mugged up quick and - more important - regurgitated ever afterwards to impress their few remaining friends. Wine fills the bill ideally. After all, when you think about it, the stuff comes in just three colours - red, white, and pink - and the important areas that grow it can’t number more than thirty or so. Put these together and mix in a few other ingredients like the quality of the soil and the character of the grape and you are well on your way to becoming an expert. What’s more, if you get into difficulties you’ve always got the label - and of course the price - to tell you how much you are supposed to be enjoying it.
The final touch comes with the use of the right phrases, and this is generally picked up by hanging around other doctors with the same complaint and listening to how they do it. “You don’t say, ‘This wine is red and produces much the same effect as methylated spirits at about forty times the price.’ You say, ‘This is surprisingly good. Really quite robust. A nice little wine.’ And of course, ‘Living up to the promise of its nose.’ You have to be patronising to the wine, you see, to give everybody the impression that back home you are drinking Chateau Grotheimer ‘47 at a hundred and twenty pounds a bottle.
I think we saved the meal for that party by calling the man ‘Doctor’. It flung him into a mood of contemplation, and all the rest of them correspondingly cheered up. He tried once or twice to stage a comeback and asked them if they knew anything about the grape-harvesting techniques in Alsace. One of the men said he did, and then he told a rather risque and quite irrelevant story about a chambermaid and a cider press which made all the girls laugh. After that there was no stopping them, and by the time we left the wine expert had pulled away from the rest of the party and was sitting morosely by himself, sniffing a cork.
On the far edge of Knighton we found a Sunday shop open. We stocked up with provisions and then set out walking towards Kington.
It must be very confusing having two towns called Knighton and Kington just ten miles apart. The main difference between them is that Knighton is in Wales and is also on the Dyke. Kington is a mile or so on the English side of the border, and, with typically English reserve, it has stepped aside from the Dyke and allowed the earthwork to go harmlessly past.
We weren’t very much excited by the idea of Kington, I don’t know why. Somehow it seemed rather spineless to have come all this way and then be spending the night on the English side of the border. So, when we had walked the hilly miles past Presteigne and round the slopes of an enormous Iron Age camp which Offa had taken one look at and decided to dodge past, we turned off along the road to Old Radnor just to be sure that we remained in Wales. And, as good luck would have it, about the hour of the evening pint, a roadside boozer hove into view bearing the good honest sign of The Plough above its door. And, to cut a long story short, while we were ruminating on his excellent ale, we negotiated with the landlord for a night’s lodging. And he took us into the barn and made room for us by moving over the old ram which was tethered there; and by the time we came back inside for an egg and chips we were washed and brushed, with our sleeping-bags spread out on the straw and our hearts ready to receive the burst of Welsh song which began to well up around the crowded bar an hour or two later.
The singing from that bar I shall never forget. Singing is the great glory of the Welsh. I am told that in all Europe only two nations can come close to them for their in-dyed sense of song. These are the Poles and the Basques. But I shall not travel to either of these countries only to be disappointed by the comparison with Wales. No finer sound can rise spontaneously from the throats of men than rose from The Plough that evening - so why should I cross continents to learn what I know already?
Englishmen can sometimes be very silly about Welsh music, and it arises I supposes from an inferiority complex. They know that they haven’t got the passion and the bravura to do the job themselves, and so they look around for some way of damning the superior article with faint praise.
An Englishman once told me a story - a shaggy second-hand story, if ever I heard one - to illustrate what he said were the limitations of Welsh music.
An Englishman applied to a large Welsh chapel for the job of professional organist and choirmaster. At the appointed time he presented himself before the assembled elders to be interviewed.
‘Tell me, boy,’ said the senior elder. ‘You are supposed to be bloody hot at music, see. What do you think of Beethoven now?’
‘Beethoven?’ said the organist cheerfully. ‘I know him quite well, as a matter of fact. Beethoven happens to be my brother-in- law.’
‘Does he now? Well, what about Mozart then, tell me that?’
‘Since you mention it,’ said the organist, ‘I know Mozart pretty closely as well. Mozart, you know, was a great friend of my father’s for years and years.’
‘I see. And Benjamin Britten, boy. Do you know him too?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the organist. ‘I was at school with Benjamin Britten. Now if you don’t mind I think I’d better be getting along. I’ve got to catch the 4.15 from Cardiff back to London.’
After the Englishman had left all the elders put their heads together to consider their verdict.
‘I wouldn’t bother with him, if you take my advice,’ pronounced the senior elder as they sat around. ‘He’s a bloody liar for the start, see. I know for a fact because my brother works on the railway: there’s no such train as the 4.15 to London.’
What a dismal and appalling story! Without a seed of truth - which is what every story has to have if it is going to strike any sort of chord in the listener. Can’t you just hear the gasping and croaking that would come up from the larynx of the man who told me that, if you presented him with a sheet of music and asked him to sing a single line. When your musical performance is one twentieth as good as that of a Welsh petrol-pump attendant, my friend, then I’ll bother with you. In the mean time get back to your Kensington flat and listen to Mahler on the stereo.
We went to sleep with ‘Land of My Fathers’ ringing in our ears.