The Principals

by Bill James

  ‘Widmerpool questions whether a statue is the right way to commemorate a great man,’ Elvira Barton (Classics) said.

  ‘Who?’ Bill Davey (French) replied.

  ‘Kenneth Widmerpool,’ Jed Laver (Industrial Relations) said. ‘He’s already been mentioned – a comical, plonking, rather dangerous character in Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume novel A Dance To The Music Of Time.’

  ‘Yes, in A Buyer’s Market – second book of the sequence – people at a dinner party are discussing what would be the right sort of statue to honour Earl Haig,’ Angela Drape (Environmental Engineering) said.

  ‘A dinner at the Walpole-Wilson’s in Eaton Square, London, I think,’ Claud Nelmes (Physics) said. ‘Circa 1928.’

  ‘Haig led the British Expeditionary Force in the Great War. Butcher Haig as he was sometimes known, because of the millions of soldiers killed,’ Elvira said. ‘Powell is mocking this kind of lumbering, slightly zany conversation – should Haig be shown on a horse, or in a car or at a desk? Someone suggests a papier mâché model of a horse to ensure accuracy. Widmerpool says statues could cause traffic problems.’

  ‘But the principals’ statues will be on university ground, surely,’ Theo said. ‘Traffic wouldn’t be affected.’

  ‘We are concerned with the principles,’ Ollam said.

  ‘Yes, I know it’s about the principals – Principal Bert and the other two,’ Theo said.

  ‘The principles,’ Ollam said. ‘The general question of whether statues are the kind of thing wanted these days to indicate worth.’

  ‘There’s a town called Widmerpool, in Cheshire, I believe,’ Davey said. ‘Perhaps this Widmerpool gent thought he, personally, wouldn’t need a statue because he had a town named after him. Therefore statues should be phased out.’

  ‘I think it was the other way about,’ Jed said.

  ‘Which other way?’ Davey asked.

  ‘Powell named the character after the town,’ Jed replied. ‘The town pre-existed the fictional person. Philip Larkin, the poet, slammed Powell for pinching a name like that.’

  ‘Does Larkin have a statue?’ Davey asked.

  ‘He was very tall, wasn’t he, maybe as tall as Victor Tane?’ Theo said.

  ‘Lucy argued a while back that one or two of our presumptions about the statues might be open to question – the plinth matter, for instance,’ Wayne Ollam replied. ‘But I want to ask whether our absolutely basic assumption – that there should be statues at all – might have been too hastily arrived at. Should we really be niggling over structural and positional details? Isn’t there a case for recommending that there should be no statues at all, neither the Chote, nor the Tane, nor the Tane nor the Chote, let alone the fantasized, forecasted Sir Bert?’

  Mart Moss said, ‘But we’ve been asked by the principal – in fact, more or less instructed by the principal, Sir Bert – to come up with a plan for installing the statues, Wayne. This would appear to endorse the provision of statues, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Ostensibly, yes,’ Wayne replied. ‘I would like to ask, though, whether in his thinking about the statues of his predecessors and therefore also speculating mentally about his own, in due course, statue, he will sense that perhaps in the 21st century – and possibly much further on in the 21st century entailing continuous, deep, rapid social change – he might sense that statues will have become infra dig and super-naff. He might decide he will not need a statue, that, in fact, a statue would be otiose and vain. And this could cause him to think that even now, at this earlier 21st-century date, statues have become redundant, corny, gross, as well as incapable of showing the actual energy he brought to his career. He’d possibly come to regard statues as objects to stick piss-pots on the stone heads of or to daub with painted ribaldries, such as “Show us your arse.”

  ‘He finds himself, however, in the grip of snobbish tradition rather than free to follow his private conclusions, and, accordingly, he commissions us to devise a practicable scheme for the Chote, Tane or Tane, Chote memorials. Does it strike nobody else here that he might wish to be liberated from all those trite pressures and expectations? Might it not be an act of mercy to go to him and say, “Sir Bert, we find after several causeries carried out in the best, balanced, higher-education style that we are of a concerted mind which says statues are unholy shit and the Tane, Chote or Chote, Tane project should be finally and irretrievably flushed away.”

  ‘There is, of course, one outstanding reason why memorials are regarded with scepticism now, though perhaps we would not put this to Sir Bert. It has an element of controversy about it. I’m sure some of you would understand what I mean.’

  ‘The Jimmy Savile headstone,’ Theo said, ‘with that appalling inscription, “It was good while it lasted.”’

  ‘Exactly,’ Wayne replied.

  ‘“Philanthropist”, another of the inscriptions,’ Theo said.

  ‘The Sir Jimmy, O.B.E. headstone,’ Wayne said. ‘This memorial in a Scarborough cemetery was four feet high and six feet wide. It reeked of praise for a man whose life had seemed devoted to good causes, especially good causes aimed at helping children. In fact he was a rampant, scheming paedophile and used his secret closeness to some children for sex. He had a television spot called Jim’ll Fix It. This was supposedly concerned with granting selected children something they wished for, dreamed of. It’s actual purpose, though, was to fix things for himself sexually. Likewise, he presented a music programme called Top of the Pops, which gave him access to young fans of the show.

  ‘When the truth about him emerged after his death the black granite headstone came to be seen as a disgusting, lying monstrosity and it was demolished and sent as landfill by his family. I’m not saying that the statues of Victor Tane and/or Lawford Chote, or Lawford Chote and/or Victor Tane would get destroyed, but I am saying that people looking at memorials these days and, no doubt, in future days, no matter what form they take, wonder whether the tribute is deserved or a cover-up for the remembered one’s real life.’

  Moss said, ‘This will certainly give us something to think over before our next scheduled causerie, Wayne. Thank you.’

  NINETEEN

  1987

  CENTENARY CONCERT AT d’BRINDLE HALL

  By O.T.O. Jurbb, Music Correspondent

  Last night’s musical event at the city’s brand new d’Brindle Hall marked the opening of three weeks’ celebration in honour of Sedge University’s centenary year. Some will see a chilling comparison between this ambitious, glittering occasion and the so-said re-arranging of deck chairs on the Titanic as she sank. Others might recall Thomas Hardy’s poem, The Convergence of the Twain, which described the luxurious fitting out of the liner during construction, while the iceberg that would slash the vessel open was also under construction, but meteorological construction, growing bigger and more dangerous at the Pole, ready to ‘converge’. A similar sort of grim convergence might have been in the air yesterday evening at the d’Brindle: high, splendid ambition in deadly collision with Sedge’s massive debts and near bankruptcy. As E.M. Forster nearly said, ‘Only connect the prose of this review and the poverty.’

  For the Sedge concert to take place in the d’Brindle Hall could be seen as painfully ironic. The d’Brindle is a magnificent, very recent addition to the Sedge campus and is named after the distinguished British composer and conductor, Harvey d’Brindle, a former student and subsequently professor of music at Sedge, who died a few years ago. His widow, Martha Maud d’Brindle was present last night. She heard one of her husband’s most famous works, the gigue, Cumulus Resurgent, played with reasonable vim and competence by a section of the orchestra.

  The unpaid builder’s account for d’Brindle Hall is one of the university’s major debts. To a cruel degree it typifies the kind of cash difficulty afflicting Sedge. The fine new, acoustically perfect venue, is very much the brainchild and darling of Dr Lawford Chote, Sedge’s principal. He, unquestionably, provided the original impetus for creation of the d�
�Brindle and has diligently guided and nursed the project through the not-always-positive and/or helpful intricacies of governmental and/or academic bureaucracy. The d’Brindle is, in some ways, a tribute to Dr Chote as much as it is to Harvey d’Brindle.

  But this tribute to the principal comes with a bill. And it is a millions sterling bill. The number of millions has not been disclosed. Guesses range from £4 million to £12 million. At any rate, formidable. Good acoustics don’t come cheap. Sedge has so far failed to pay. Sedge can’t pay. Knowledgeable folk in the audience last night might have been glancing back over their shoulders in case the duns and bum-bailiffs arrived with something other than gigues in their minds. The d’Brindle is, perhaps, the most flagrant instance of what can be seen as Dr Chote’s heady, audacious, thrilling but devilishly pricey, expansionism. There are others on campus, including an impressive new curved staircase, carpeted in azure blue, leading to the grandly refurbished staff dining room and bar, a stairway to the stars, or to the cliff’s edge.

  Dr Chote is himself an accomplished amateur musician, specialising in percussion and particularly the cymbals. At the concert he gave a short, cameo performance of a piece from Wagner’s Tannhauser. As he clashed those two shining brass discs together at pretty well exactly the right dramatic moments one could see the challenging sound as defiance, a sort of Bronx cheer, aimed at those who regard his principalship as disastrous, and want him kicked out while there might still be time to save Sedge under a new chief and a more sane regime.

  Dr Chote is not a big man and has a sensitive, pale, aquiline, nunnish sort of face, but the force he could get into smashing those two cymbals together seemed ferocious. Your critic half expected him to stick his tongue out at any enemies in the hall between each ultra decibelled bang. His features showed no feelings, though. He remained virtually deadpan except for a scarcely perceptible, flickering hint that he kept an orderly, vindictive pack of hatreds kennelled within him and might turn it loose at any time he’d regard as appropriate and/or destructive.

  Reading this review in the local daily, Martin Moss wondered whether O.T.O. Jurbb was an alias for Alan Norton-Hord, editor of the paper, who’d seemed so investigative and clued-up about the Sedge predicament in the grandly refurbished bar and staff dining room, immediately after Mart’s inaugural spiel about rural rogering as a newly promoted prof. Editors sometimes took pen names so that personal views should not be regarded as the views of the paper. There were people called Jurbb? But in a multi-cultural country there might be.

  Mart couldn’t remember ever having seen this by-line in the paper before. He’d noticed Norton-Hord at the concert last night, but he might have been attending as a civic dignitary, not as critic and reporter. Was Norton-Hord the kind who would flourish his familiarity with Thomas Hardy and Morgan Forster? As an ex-Sedge student, would he write so bluntly about the university being near-fatally hard-up? Would he spray the faint praise around: the performance of Cumulus Resurgent done with ‘reasonable’ vim and competence; the timing of Lawford Chote’s interventions with the cymbals at ‘pretty well exactly the right dramatic moments’ in the Tannhauser clip? Would O.T.O. Jurbb?

  Mart Moss didn’t go much on classical music so he couldn’t judge whether the performance of Cumulus Resurgent was only just up to scratch; nor whether Lawford Chote had the timing of his cymbal flurries right. Watching Chote with the instruments had reminded Mart of some B.B.C. television archive material re-broadcast lately in a programme on changing comedy styles. A small, baby-faced, bald performer called Charlie Drake had done some cymbal bashing with an orchestra and after each echoing, metallic boom looked totally dazed, as if the din had morphed into solid form and clobbered his head. Jurbb, in his column, had called Chote’s appearance at those aftermath moments ‘deadpan’. Martin thought ‘concussed’ more to the point. But he would agree with Jurbb’s suggestion that the clangour caused by Lawford carried a message of defiance, contempt, war, for those who wanted his humiliation and defeat. There might be a further show of defiance when the centenary celebrations culminated in the Plain Parlour banquet at Standfast Fort.

  Cymbals in Lawford’s hands might also have been useful in keeping Rowena awake. She had a front row seat. Mart was some way behind and could not see her face, but she hadn’t slumped and seemed to do a little shoulder dance during a movement from one of the Mozart symphonies. Moss reckoned music started to fall away after the seventeenth century, and definitely by the time Mozart started. This didn’t mean Mart would go along with Jim Dixon’s description of Wolfgang Amadeus in Lucky Jim as ‘filthy Mozart’. What people should remember about Mozart was that he had to write much of his stuff for paying patrons who might be laid up at home with gout and/or a double dose of pox. They wouldn’t object that a composition was full of phoney joyous, scampering, bubbly riffs. To be reminded of joy, and the ability to scamper, and/or something bubbly in any form would be a plus for them. But Mart preferred, say, Henry Purcell’s neat, unshowy, purposeful songs and anthems about a hundred years earlier, and British with it.

  Moss read some more of Jurbb.

  Although several of the items on the centenary concert menu were executed with no more than workmanlike efficiency, we have to be grateful that the musicians turned up and played at all when, most probably, they had no assurance there would be a cashable cheque to follow. Despite all the rumours – and more than rumours – about impending disaster, the combined names of Sedge and Lawford Chote have been enough to make a function like last night’s possible and to a not inconsiderable sense successful. Although Sedge and Lawford Chote are perilously short of cash, they still have charisma.

  Yes, Mart could say ‘Agreed’ to this.

  TWENTY

  1987

  Rowena and Lawford Chote also read the O.T.O. Jurbb review next morning. It gave them a few good laughs. They were in bed. They had a pre-breakfast daybreak routine. Soon after the newspapers had been delivered, she or he – an alternating duty – would go downstairs to pick them up, then return, snuggle under the duvet again and for half an hour or so read bits to each other and perhaps view some of the more striking photographs together. If there were exciting pictures of, say, the return of otters to a stretch of river somewhere, or a seascape, or an arboretum, or a starlings’ flight-swarm, they might take a break from the press for a while and make leisurely love, so as to link up, as it were, with nature. Breakfast could be delayed for a while. She thought more of nature than Lawford did, but he wasn’t actually anti and would go along with Rowena.

  It would have been wise before starting sex if they’d folded the newspapers and put them on the floor or a bedside table. But both felt this would seem too calculated and unimpassioned, as though they had to abide by an etiquette book diktat: ‘Always clear away surplus items before coitus.’ If they wanted a sort of inspired link with thousands of soaring, swooping starlings they couldn’t take time out to make some press sheets dailies tidy. As a result pages could get badly crumpled and even torn because of the threshing about. If they were smoothable-out afterwards Rowena or Lawford would smooth them out. Torn pages might be repairable with transparent sticky tape. They kept some of that in the bedside table drawer along with scissors and a stiff-backed copy of the proper, King James version of the Bible. Now and then they’d enjoy a joint reading of a Psalm, one doing the first, strong line of a verse, the other coming in with the backup. A favourite at present for Lawford, as could be expected, was: ‘Plead my cause, oh Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.’

  The concert review didn’t set them off hormonally but did produce major non-sexual chuckles. ‘Yes, Ro, I think it does what we wanted,’ Lawford said, ‘that sort of back-handed praise: nothing too lavish and sloppy. So, only reasonable vim and competence given to Cumulus Resurgent. And then, my pretty well timed cymbal wallops.’

  ‘The Titanic references work OK, I think, don’t you?’ she replied. ‘They’ll get through to people’s
feelings. Decent, sensitive folk will say we had that terrible tragedy all those years ago, so why haven’t we learned from it?’

  Lawford giggled. ‘I liked “acoustics don’t come cheap”. Slangy but terse-effective. And then those in the audience who couldn’t concentrate on the music because they were afraid the bums were about to arrive and strip the place! A hoot.’

  They both had guffaws at this idea, and, possibly, at an imagined glimpse of Lawford sticking his tongue out and/or giving a raspberry to his opponents between clashes on the pretty well-timed cymbal detonations. Sitting up in bed they did a duet of fart noises with their lips.

  ‘How’s my charisma looking today, Ro?’ he said.

  She put her head under the duvet. ‘Seems fine to me,’ she replied.

  Lawford went through the review again. ‘The “stairway to the stars” that turns into a lemming-drop. Great, Ro! And the internal hate kennels! “Cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of war.” Wonderful!’

  ‘It wasn’t easy, you know, Lawf.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘I didn’t want it to sound abject and self-pitying yet to be, in fact, an appeal for understanding and sympathy.’

  ‘You hit that. It will help us.’

  ‘And not biased – not biased in favour of you and Sedge. I had to promise Alan Norton-Hord that, before he’d let me do it. He wants to help Sedge – past chairman of the students’ union and so on. But he’s editor now of a respectable provincial paper and has to seem to be fair and impartial.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I had to phrase things here and there to sound blunt and dogmatic – “Sedge has so far failed to pay. Sedge can’t pay.” But my review’s overall objective was to make people – especially government people – yes, the objective was to make them ask whether it was sane to let Sedge go under like the Titanic because the university’s finances couldn’t keep up with the principal’s noble, life-enhancing, splendiferous, aims.’