by Alan Coren
I leave, I’m afraid, the decision to the bookseller himself. If he chooses to opt for the safest course, and buy three times as many copies as he would otherwise have done, I should prefer, in the interests of modesty and good taste, that the suggestion did not come from me.
24
Baby Talk, Keep Talking Baby Talk
Harvard’s Social Psychiatry Laboratory has been analysing the special language adults use when talking to children; and it doesn’t like it. Children, it believes, should be spoken to as adults. And vice versa?
The Savoy Grill. An elderly diner has pushed his plate to one side and is staring absently into the middle distance. To him, a waiter.
‘You haven’t eaten up your blanquette de veau, sir.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Don’t be a silly diner. It’s delicious.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘It is.’
‘Isn’t!’
‘Is!’
‘ISN’T! ISN’T! ISN’T!’
‘I’m going to turn my back, sir, and I’m going to count up to ten, and when I turn round again I want to see all that nice blanquette de veau eaten up. ONE – TWO – THREE –’
‘I’m going to be sick.’
‘– FIVE – SIX –’
‘I’m going to stick my fingers down my throat and I’m going to be sick on my new dinner jacket and I’m going to be sick on my new shoes and I’m going to be sick on my new mistress and I’m going to be sick on the tablecloth, and I DON’T CARE!’
‘Look, sir, shall I tell you what we’re going to do? You see that great big boiled potato? Well, that’s Mount Everest. And the brussels sprouts are going to climb right up it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re mountaineers.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is, and because I say so. But when they get to the top, they’re going to be eaten by a Yeti. And do you know who the Yeti is?’
‘No.’
‘You are, sir! You’re a big brave Yeti, and you’re going to eat all the mountaineers up!’
‘I’m not a Yeti, I’m not, I’m not! I want some pudding.’
‘Sorry, sir, no pudding until you’ve eaten your blanquette de veau all up.’
‘I’ll scream!’
‘That’s quite enough of that, sir. Do you want me to call the Head Waiter?’
‘No.’
‘You know what the Head Waiter does to naughty diners, don’t you, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re going to eat up your nice blanquette de veau, aren’t you?’
‘Can I have some pudding afterwards?’
‘If you’re very, very good.’
‘All right.’
The Manager’s office, Barcloyd’s Bank. A knock on the door.
‘Yes? Ah – it’s Hopcroft, isn’t it?’
‘Hoskins, sir.’
‘Speak up, boy!’
‘Hoskins, sir!’
‘Have you got something in your mouth, Hoskins?’
‘It’s a – no, sir – I mean, yes sir, it’s my pipe, sir.’
‘And you think you can come in here smoking a pipe, do you, Hoskins? You think you can afford a pipe, do you?’
‘Well, sir, I—’
‘Don’t lie to me, Hoskins, you snivelling little beast! And stop scratching yourself. What’s that in your hand?’
‘It’s my m-monthly statement, sir.’
‘Is it, Hoskins, is it indeed? And are you proud of your monthly statement, Hoskins?’
‘No, sir.’
‘No, sir. Well nor am I, sir. And I’ve asked you to come and see me, Hoskins, because I’m very disappointed in you. Very disappointed indeed!’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘Stop whining, Hoskins! If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a customer who whines. I had great hopes for you, Hoskins: I pride myself on being able to pick a promising customer, a customer who’ll go far, a customer who will be a credit to Barcloyd’s. A credit, Hoskins. Do you even know what the word means?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I doubt that, Hoskins. I doubt that very much. You will please conjugate the verb to be in credit.’
‘I am in credit, thou art in credit, he is in credit, we are in credit, you are in credit, they are in credit.’
‘And are you in credit, Hoskins?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I despair, Hoskins, I truly despair. Look at the other customers, look at Sibley, and Greene, and Maltravers, look at Finnegan – credit accounts, deposit accounts, special accounts, joint accounts, all in credit, all improving every day, all rising to the top, all customers I can be proud of. And look at your younger brother, Hoskins Minor: he’s just become Hoskins & Gribble Ltd. He’ll go far.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Now, Hoskins, your teller informs me that you want to buy a bicycle. Is this true?’
‘Well, sir, I thought—’
‘I know what you thought, Hoskins, you thought you’d sneak off at every opportunity and go gallivanting about on your wretched machine instead of working. Well, Hoskins, I am not having it, do you hear? Now, unfortunately, our rules only permit me certain penalties, and since you are already paying eleven per cent on your wretched scroungings – God, if the Founder had lived to see a Barcloyd’s chap beg! – there is only one other course open to me. You will stay behind after work, Hoskins, and you will do one hour’s overtime per day. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And think yourself lucky you live in so-called enlightened times, Hoskins. In my day, you’d have been hauled up in front of the whole bank and made bankrupt! Now get out!’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
A Surbiton bedroom. Afternoon. The blinds are drawn. The door bursts open.
‘ALICE! You’re playing with that awful milkman again! What did I tell you would happen if I ever caught you with him after last time?’
‘You said you’d divorce me.’
‘And did I say I would never ever play with you again?’
‘Yes.’
‘I only come up ’ere about the one doz large brown eggs as per note, I never—’
‘You shut up! You just shut up! You’re a nasty horrid person and we don’t want you playing in our house! Alice is my friend!’
‘I wasn’t doing nothing, I was only talking, I didn’t touch nothing, I never—’
‘That’s a double negative! You’re a stupid uneducated little snot, and you live in a council estate, and you’re not allowed to play with nice people! That was a double negative, Alice, did you hear it? That’s what happens when you ask them in. You’ll be picking up all sorts of things.’
‘He’s not common, Reginald, he’s not, he’s NOT!’
‘He’s still got his socks on, Alice. He’s in bed with his socks on!’
‘So what?’
‘Har, har, har! Who’s in bed with his socks on? Har, har, har! You wait till I tell your mother about this, Alice, you wait till I tell her about him with his socks on in bed!’
‘Your mother used to wear a wig! Reginald’s mummy used to wear a ginger wig, Dennis!’
‘Wun’t surprise me. Wun’t surprise me at all. Wun’t—’
‘You just shut up! Your feet smell.’
‘So do yours, with brass knobs on, and no returns.’
‘And you haven’t folded your trousers! He hasn’t folded his trousers, Alice, he’s just thrown them down all anyhow, he’s just thrown them on the floor! You’ve just thrown them on the floor, you horrible little bogie!’
‘Knickers!’
‘Horse stuff in the road!’
‘Wee-wee!’
‘There we are, Alice, he’s swearing, he’s saying filthy things, what did I tell you? Why are you playing with him?’
‘It’s your fault, Reginald, you won’t play with me anymore, you’re always goin
g out or too tired or something, and he’s got all sorts of new games, it serves you right, so there!’
‘But he’s not even a member of our gang, he’s never played Conservatives in his life, he’s got hairs in his nose, and—’
‘If you let me in your gang, you can ’ave a go on the float.’
‘What? I mean, pardon?’
‘You can drive it up Winchmore Crescent and back.’
‘Oh.’
‘You can blow the ’ooter and rattle the crates, and everything.’
‘Can I wear your cap?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the satchel with the change in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Super!’
‘Can Dennis come to play again, then, Reginald?’
‘Well – only if he’s very, very good.’
‘He is.’
‘All right, then.’
25
The Hell at Pooh Corner
From Christopher Robin Milne’s recent autobiography, it turns out that life in the Milne household was very different from what millions of little readers have been led to believe. But if it was grim for him, what must it have been like for some of the others involved? I went down to Pooh Corner – it is now a tower block, above a discount warehouse – for this exclusive interview.
Winnie-the-Pooh is sixty now, but looks far older. His eyes dangle, and he suffers from terminal moth. He walks into things a lot. I asked him about that, as we sat in the pitiful dinginess which has surrounded him for almost half a century.
‘Punchy,’ said Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘is what I am. I’ve been to some of the best people, Hamley’s, Mothercare, they all say the same thing: there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s all that hammering you took in the old days.’
Bitterly, he flicked open a well-thumbed copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, and read the opening lines aloud:
‘“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs.”’ He looked at me. ‘The hell it was!’ he muttered. ‘You think I didn’t want to walk down, like normal people? But what chance did I stand? Every morning, it was the same story, this brat comes in and grabs me and next thing I know the old skull is bouncing on the lousy lino. Also,’ he barked a short bitter laugh, ‘that was the last time anyone called me Edward Bear. A distinguished name, Edward. A name with class. After the king, you know.’
I nodded. ‘I know,’ I said.
‘But did it suit the Milnes?’ Pooh hurled the book into the grate, savagely. ‘Did it suit the itsy-bitsy, mumsy-wumsy, ooze-daddy’s-ickle-boy-den Milnes? So I was Winnie-the-Pooh. You want to know what it was like when the Milnes hit the sack and I got chucked in the toy-cupboard for the night?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘It was “Hello, sailor!” and “Give us a kiss, Winifred!” and “Watch out, Golly, I think he fancies you!”, not to mention,’ and here he clenched his sad, mangy little fists, ‘the standard “Oy, anyone else notice there’s a peculiar poo in here, ha, ha, ha!”’
‘I sympathise,’ I said, ‘but surely there were compensations? Your other life, in the wood, the wonderful stories of . . .’
‘Yeah,’ said Pooh, heavily, ‘the wood, the stories. The tales of Winnie-the-Schmuck, you mean? Which is your favourite? The one where I fall in the gorse bush? The one where I go up in the balloon and the kid shoots me down? Or maybe you prefer where I get stuck in the rabbit hole?’
‘Well, I—’
‘Hanging from a bloody balloon,’ muttered Pooh, ‘singing the kind of song you get put in the funny farm for! Remember?
“How sweet to be a cloud,
Floating in the blue!
Every little cloud
Always sings aloud.”
That kind of junk,’ said Pooh, ‘may suit Rolf Harris. Not me.’
‘Did you never sing it, then?’ I enquired.
‘Oh, I sang it,’ said Pooh. ‘I sang it all right. It was in the script. Dumb bear comes on and sings. It was in the big Milne scenario. But you know what I wanted to sing?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said.
His little asymmetrical eyes grew even glassier, with a sadness that made me look away.
‘Body and Soul,’ murmured Pooh, ‘is what I wanted to sing. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. Or play the trumpet, possibly. It was,’ he sighed, ‘1926. Jazz, short skirts, nightingales singing in Berkeley Square, angels dancing at the Ritz, know what I mean? A world full of excitement, sex, fun, Frazer-Nash two-seaters and everyone going to Le Touquet! And where was I? Hanging around with Piglet and passing my wild evenings in the heady company of Eeyore! The Great Gatsby came out that year,’ said Pooh, bitterly. ‘The same year as Winnie-the-Pooh.’
‘I begin to understand,’ I said.
‘Why couldn’t he write that kind of thing about me?’ cried the anguished Pooh. ‘Why didn’t I get the breaks? Why wasn’t I a great tragic hero, gazing at the green light on the end of Daisy’s dock? Why didn’t Fitzgerald write Gatsby Meets A Heffelump and Milne The Great Pooh?’
‘But surely it was fun, if nothing else?’ I said. ‘Wasn’t the Milne household full of laughter and gaiety and—’
‘A.A. Milne,’ Pooh interrupted, ‘was an Assistant Editor of Punch. He used to come home like Bela Lugosi. I tell you, if we wanted a laugh, we used to take a stroll round Hampstead cemetery.’
Desperately, for the heartbreak of seeing this tattered toy slumped among his emotional debris was becoming unendurable, I sought an alternative tack.
‘But think,’ I said cheerily, ‘of all the millions of children you have made happy!’
He was not to be shaken from his gloom.
‘I’d rather,’ he grunted, ‘think of all the bears I’ve made miserable. After the Pooh books, the industry went mad. My people came off the assembly line like sausages. Millions of little bears marching towards the exact same fate as my own, into the hands of kids who’d digested the Milne rubbish, millions of nursery tea-parties where they were forced to sit around propped against a stuffed piglet in front of a little plastic plate and have some lousy infant smear their faces with jam. “O look, nurse, Pooh’s ate up all his cake!” Have you any idea what it’s like,’ he said, ‘having marmalade on your fur? It never,’ and his voice dropped an octave, ‘happened to Bulldog Drummond.’
‘I’m sorry?’
Pooh reached for a grubby notebook, and flipped it open.
‘“Suddenly the door burst from its hinges, and the doorway filled with a huge and terrible shape.
‘“Get away from that girl, you filthy Hun swine!” it cried.
‘“The black-hearted fiend who had been crouched over the lovely Phyllis turned and thrust a fist into his evil mouth.
‘“Mein Gott!” he shrieked, “Es ist Edward Bear, MC, DSO!”
‘“With one bound, our hero . . .”’
Pooh snapped the notebook shut.
‘What’s the use?’ he said. ‘I wrote that, you know. After Milne packed it in, I said to myself, it’s not too late, I know where the pencil-box is, I shall come back like Sherlock Holmes, a new image, a . . . I took it to every publisher in London. “Yes, very interesting,” they said, “what about putting in a bit where he gets his paw stuck in a honey jar, how would it be if he went off with Roo and fell in a swamp, and while you’re at it, could he sing a couple of songs about bath-night?”’
He fell silent. I cleared my throat a couple of times. Far off, a dog barked, a lift clanged. I stood up, at last, since there seemed nothing more to say.
‘Is there anything you need?’ I said, somewhat lamely.
‘That’s all right,’ said Winnie-the-Pooh. ‘I get by. No slice of the royalties, of course, oh dear me no, well, I’m only the bloody bear, aren’t I? Tell you what, though, if you’re going past an off-license, you might have them send up a bottle of gin.’
‘I’d be delighted to,’ I said.
He saw me to the door.
‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘I could never stand honey.’
26
And Though They Do Their Best To
Bring Me Aggravation . . .
‘Did you bring back something special from your holiday?
Why not enter our Grand Souvenir Competition?’
Daily Telegraph
When Sir Henry Souvenir (1526–1587) at last returned to the court of Queen Elizabeth from his ten-year tour of the Orient, he little thought that their opening exchange would pass into history.
‘What have you brought for me?’ asked his queen.
‘It’s a box made from the liver of an elephant, your majesty,’ replied Sir Henry, ‘wrought in strange fashion by the natives and covered in sea-shells. You can keep fags in it.’
‘Where did you get it?’ she inquired.
‘I can’t remember,’ he said.
And thus it was that the pattern of the next four hundred years was firmly laid. Ever since that fateful day in 1570, people have been coming back from distant parts carrying things to put cigarettes in, which they give to other people to remind them of places that neither of them can recall. The word “souvenir” has, of course, slightly extended itself in meaning until it now denotes almost anything either breakable or useless; but even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale.
Some people don’t actually give their souvenirs away, preferring instead to build up a vast collection with which to decorate lofts; it is not immediately clear why they do this, but a strong ritualistic element is clearly involved, no doubt because the objects are themselves closely associated with the passing of time and take on a totemistic quality from this association. Souvenirs, for example, can never be thrown away, probably because to do so would be to wipe out the past of which they are the only extant record. They are, however, moved around the loft every five years or so, when their lids tend to fall off or, in the case of clocks, when their cuckoos fall out.