by Alan Coren
The cuckoo clock, in fact, may be said to be the quintessential souvenir, in that it exists purely to be bought, sold, wrapped, carried home, unwrapped, and put in lofts. It never hangs on walls. It is usually purchased in Switzerland, where it never hangs on walls either. How it became involved with Switzerland is a horological mystery of a high order, but experts have suggested that since Switzerland has nothing else to identify it (i.e., Eiffel Towers, Taj Mahals, castanets, lederhosen, chopsticks), and since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by. The undeniable success of the cuckoo clock has led the Swiss to branch out with typically cautious adventurousness: removing the tiny house from which the cuckoo emerges, they have enlarged it in recent years and inserted a music-box inside it, which, when you lift the lid, starts to play ‘O Mine Papa’ and breaks.
It’s for keeping cigarettes in.
Mention of the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal lead me naturally to point out an important secondary characteristic of the souvenir. It is invariably an imitation of something else. Even when it’s original. Inventiveness of a remarkable kind often goes into this imitation, and accusations of vulgarity by citizens like Lord Snowdon (who has himself been called a vulgar imitation, though not by me) do not detract from the brilliance of the minds that, for example, saw in the Eiffel Tower not a thousand feet of iron, but six inches of saltcellar with a nude in the base and a thermometer up one side. Not that our own English craftsmen have been left behind in the race for international kudos: a mere mile from where I am writing this, you can buy a midget guardsman with ten fags in his busby and a gas lighter on his rifle, or a pygmy beefeater out of whose cunningly constructed mouth twenty different scenes of London may be pulled, in full colour. All over Kansas, at this very moment, recent visitors to Britain will be trying to glue its head back on.
Souvenirs also have an invaluable role to play as conversation pieces, even though there will usually be more pieces than conversation. The talk is often quite fascinating, viz:
‘Yes, we bought that in Brussels, ha-ha-ha, amusing isn’t it? When you switch it on, it pees. Oh. Well, it did. Perhaps it needs a new batt— now look what you’ve done, it’s come off in your hand. We’ll never get the cigarettes out of it now.’ Or;
‘This nut-dish is constructed entirely out of a single piece of elkhorn, by the way, and the crackers are made from the ribs of an okapi. Yes. O-K-A-P-I. And now, if you care to pick up that pin-cushion in the shape of the Great Pyramid, you will find— oh, really? But it’s only nine o’clock, and of course you haven’t even seen our Nefertiti door-step yet, THAT CARPET YOU’RE RUNNING DOWN IS AN EXTREMELY FASCINATING EXAMPLE OF VERY EARLY SUDANESE . . .’
It’s not always easy to choose souvenirs, of course, and many people swear by clothes. I myself have sworn by a suit I bought in Hong Kong some years ago, and hope one day to bring out the oaths in book form, as soon as permissiveness establishes itself a little more securely. As everyone knows, Hong Kong has some of the finest tailors in the world, but what they actually do there is open to question, since all the clothes are made by some of the worst. My own suit, hacked from a wonderfully dirt-absorbent length of, I think, Kleenex, is loosely piled on the floor of the loft, being unable to stay on its hanger. It was, of course, cheap – less than four times as much as a similar article picked up in Savile Row when, due to a light shower in Piccadilly, the Hong Kong item started gripping my flesh with all the enthusiasm of an undernourished vampire – and this probably accounts for the way in which it was cut, since malformed Oriental dwarfs do not, I’m sure, carry much ready cash upon their persons. It’s a wonderful conversation-piece, mind. People I’d known intimately for years suddenly began pointing out that they’d never realised I had one shoulder five inches lower than the other or that my inside leg measured fourteen inches. Osteopaths would approach me in the street and offer their services free in the interest of science.
Not that I’ll be entering it in the Telegraph competition, though. The suit has competition enough at home, and my initial problem is selecting exactly which rare and precious item to blow the dust off in order to pick up the six quid with which the Telegraph hopes to console me for the misspent years of haggling in bazaars and dragging crates through airports and lashing out enough customs dues to turn the real Arc de Triomphe into a musical needlework cabinet and knock the bottom out of the French souvenir trade for ever. What shall I choose from the matchless hoard? The genuine Matabele shield, riddled with moth-holes? (No wonder Rhodesia is run by a white minority, if that’s all there was between the natives and the Maxim gun.) The elephant’s foot wastebasket, perhaps the most macabre thing ever to pass across a counter? (When we came home from India and unwrapped it, the toenails fell off.) The solid brass table-top we bought at the same Delhi shop which peeled on the plane, and rusted in the cab back from Heathrow? The hand-sewn slippers from Alexandria which gave rise to a condition which has baffled chiropodists throughout the civilised world? My genuine Dutch meerschaum, that glows in the dark, blisters, and flakes off on to the authentic Bokhara rug which is supposed to have taken two generations of Uzbeks to weave and which it took the cat one evening to unravel?
On second thoughts, I don’t think I’ll bother. Let someone else take the Telegraph’s money with his walrus-tooth-letter-opener-barometer-and-shoehorn combined, I’m hanging on to my stock. Some day soon, the Martian package tourists are going to start arriving, and I’m going to be down there at the saucerport handing out my copper-plate business cards.
Give ’em a free glass of mint tea, and those people’ll buy anything.
27
Life mit Vater
A man claiming to be one of Adolf Hitler’s sons has turned up in France, intending to sell his memoirs. One of the other ones has not been slow to follow.
I was born on January 18, 1923, at 17, Bolitha Villas, SE26. It was an ordinary little Sydenham terraced house, flanked to the left by Dunlookin, and to the right by Fredberyl. Ours was called Arbeit Macht Frei.
It was distinguishable from the rest only by virtue of its paintwork. The front door was puce, the downstairs windows were yellow, and the upstairs were variously blue, green and beige. They were painted thus by my father, this being his trade; but he was constantly going abroad on business, leaving the job partially done, and finding upon his return that the paint in the open pots had gone hard.
He would then throw the pots at my mother and run up and down Bolitha Villas in his bare feet shrieking that the Jews had left the lids off. By evening, he had invariably calmed down, and would be found, weeping, in the shed, muttering that he had gone off beige, or blue, or eau-de-nil, or whatever it happened to be. Towards midnight, I would be awoken by the strains of Wagner, and would tiptoe to the window and stare out towards the shed, through the tiny window of which I would be able to see my father in a flaxen wig beating the cat with the flat of his wooden sword.
Years later, recalling such memories, I asked my mother what had attracted her to him in the first place. She explained that she had met him at a dance in Leytonstone, where he was the only man in a helmet; halfway through the evening, he took the head of a conga line and marched it nine miles to Dagenham, in driving hail. She was, she said, carried away by his natural authority. He also had a lighter side, she maintained, and was well known, before his broody period set in, for his impressions of Charlie Chaplin.
None of this, of course, was known to me in my childhood, and my father remained, in consequence, something of a puzzle. I did not, for example, know why he slept on the roof in all weathers, and I was acutely embarrassed, being but four years old, when he took me to the Natural History Museum and insisted on goose-stepping to the bus-stop. He also, when we arrived, screamed at the dinosaur skeleton for some minutes on the grounds, as I recall, that it had given up without a struggle. He calmed down somewhat upon the arrival of three uniformed attendants, pausing
only to inspect their buttons, feel their biceps, and pat them on the head affectionately, before taking me away to look at a stuffed gorilla beside which he delivered, to my total incomprehension, a long lecture about the decadence of jazz.
That Christmas, an aunt gave me a golliwog, which my father hanged. When I asked him why, he jumped out of the window.
In the spring of 1929, on my father’s insistence, I joined the Cubs.
Although, initially, I was a figure of derision (I was the only one in a brown shirt; and also, try as I might, I could not fully disguise the fact that my cap had a spike on it), before long my little playmates were treating me with more and more respect. This was largely on account of my accoutrements; each time my daddy returned home from one of his foreign trips, he would bring me a new piece of equipment, until, by midsummer, I was turning up at meetings in riding-boots, Sam Browne belt and a gas-mask, carrying a Schmeisser machine-pistol. Where other boys wore cheap blunt penknives on their belts, I wore a grenade pouch; where they sported a woodcraft badge, I bore the Iron Cross.
Akela, our leader, was very decent about it: not only was she trained in the Montessori method, and thus responsive to self-expression irrespective of its prime motive, she also had steel spectacles gummed together at their broken bridge, thinning hair, a concave bust, and legs like Indian clubs. When my father, therefore, clasped her to him on collecting me one evening, kissed her on both sallow cheeks, and informed her that she would be the flower of the New Sydenham, a mottled glow suffused her entire visible surface.
Thereafter, I could do no wrong. When, the following week, I led my patrol away from its ostensible mission to pluck four-leaf clovers on Sydenham Hill and took them instead on a house-to-house search of Dulwich looking for Bolshevik printing presses, she awarded me the Blue Max with Oak Leaves and Crossed Swords, and allowed me to blow her whistle.
There is no guessing the heights to which I might have risen, had it not been for a characteristically over-enthusiastic blunder on my father’s part. That autumn, our group went away to weekend camp. My parents took me down in our old Morris Ten, my mother driving and my father standing on the seat beside her with his head and shoulders poking up through the sunshine roof. Upon our arrival, my father dismounted and, catching sight of the tented camp, immediately began encircling it with a roll of barbed wire he always carried in the boot.
It was while he was attempting to construct a makeshift searchlight tower by lashing one of the Morris’s headlamps to a telephone pole that an assistant to the Chief Scout ran up and insisted that he come down and explain his behaviour.
Daddy then threw himself to the ground and began biting the grass. Soon afterwards, we received a brief note informing us that Sydenham Cub Pack 1374 was being reconstituted under new leadership and that my membership of the group would not be looked upon with favour.
Of the subsequent career of Akela, I have little first-hand information: between her departure from SE26 in 1929 and her suicidal single-handed attack on General Vasilevsky’s 4th Armoured Division outside Stalingrad, history has drawn a disappointing blank.
For two years thereafter, I saw little of my father. There had been some local unpleasantness on Guy Fawkes’ Night 1929 when, by dint of a nocturnal raid on the files of Sydenham Public Library, he managed to steal enough tickets to allow him to take out its entire stock, which he then piled in our back yard and ignited, having first topped the heap with a stuffed effigy of Issy Bonn; and as the result of this he once more left the country.
Apart from one notorious flying visit to Bolitha Villas in the winter of 1930, when he showed up proudly on the arm of an aristocratic English girl – it ended in chaos when she laughed at our three china ducks and Daddy in consequence attempted to garotte Mummy with his armband – I did not see him again until late on Midsummer’s Day, 1931.
It is an occasion which remains embossed upon my memory, despite the passage of almost fifty years.
I was coming home from school, and upon turning into Bolitha Villas from Pondicherry Crescent, I noticed a large crowd outside Fredberyl. Most of them were neighbours, but there were policemen in the crowd, too, and a fire-engine was drawn up at the kerb. Fredberyl being the house next to Arbeit Macht Frei, I was therefore amazed, upon drawing nearer, to see my father at an upstairs window of it, shrieking and waving a makeshift flag.
‘What’s going on?’ I enquired of an elderly police sergeant, whom I had met when my father, during one of his many bursts of wild enthusiasm, had written to Scotland Yard applying for a submarine licence.
‘It’s your old man,’ he replied. ‘He has annexed Fredberyl. As I understand it, he intends to knock down the dividing wall and use the combined premises for a spring offensive against Dunlookin.’
Being only eight, I could not of course grasp the full implications of the situation; I was, however, understandably concerned for the welfare of my father.
‘Oh dear!’ I cried. ‘What will happen to my daddy? Will you have to go in there and drag him out and all that?’
The sergeant stared down at me in some irritation.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘Intervene in a domestic wossname? You must be joking, son! I don’t know what your old man’s got against Fredberyl and Dunlookin, but one thing’s for bleeding sure, I have not come all the way here from Tulse Hill to interfere in a quarrel in a faraway street between people of whom I know nothing.’
28
Dr No will See You Now
‘CIA agents who lose the qualities that make good spies are retired at fifty under special pensions, according to testimony yesterday before a House Intelligence Sub-Committee. “A 70-year-old James Bond is kind of hard to imagine,” said Republican Senator Sam Stratton.’
Herald Tribune
Bond tensed in the darkness, and reached for his teeth.
There was something in the room.
You did not train for fifty-three years without developing that imponderable acuity that lay beyond mere observation. Indeed, you found that as the years went by, this sixth sense came, perforce, to replace the others: these days, he could hear dog-whistles, with or without his batteries in.
At least, he assumed they were dog-whistles. Nobody else seemed to hear them.
The teeth fell exactly to hand, there between the senna and the Algipan on his bedside table. He waited a calculated split-second for the cement to cleave snugly to his palate. It felt good. It should have: it was made for him by Chas. Fillibee of Albemarle Street, the world’s premier fixative man. Senior British agents had been going to Fillibee since before the War; he knew their special requirements. When Witherspoon 004 had gone into the London Clinic to have his prostate done and the KGB had taken the opportunity to lob an Ostachnikov nuclear mortar into his grape-box, the only thing left intact between Baker Street Station and the Euston underpass had been Witherspoon’s upper plate.
Very carefully, Bond slid his hand beneath his pillow and closed it around the ribbed butt of his Walther PPK 9mm Kurz with the custom-enlarged trigger guard by Rinz of Stuttgart which allowed the arthritic knuckle of Bond’s forefinger to slide smoothly around the trigger. His other hand took the light switch.
In one smooth, practised move, Bond snapped on the light switch and simultaneously peered around the room.
There was a shadowy, half-familiar figure by the dressing table. Bond fired, twice, the fearful reports cracking back and forth between the walls, and the figure reeled.
‘So much,’ murmured Bond coolly, ‘for Comrade Nevachevski!’
Miss Moneypenny sat up in bed, her grizzled bun unravelling, her elegant muffler in fetching disarray.
‘You silly old sod,’ she said.
Bond beamed, deafly.
‘Yes, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘Inch or so wide, mind, should’ve been straight between the eyes, but, my God, he didn’t even have time to draw!’
‘YOU’VE SHOT YOUR WIG-STAND!’ shouted Miss Moneypenny. She stuck an ephedrine inhaler in her left nostril
, and sucked noisily.
Bond put on his bi-focals.
‘Ah,’ he said. He brightened. ‘Still a bloody good shot, though, eh?’
‘I should cocoa,’ said Moneypenny. ‘It ricocheted off the hot-water bottle. God alone knows what it’s done to your rubber sheet.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Bond.
He switched the light out again, and lay back. As always, after untoward events, his wheeze was bad, crackling round the room like crumpling cellophane.
‘Shall I rub you in?’ murmured Moneypenny softly, from her distant cot.
‘Don’t start,’ said Bond.
Moneypenny sighed. At sixty-eight, it seemed, her virginity was moving slowly but surely beyond threat.
Bond shuffled nonchalantly into M’s office and tossed his hat in a neat arc towards the polished antler. The hat fell in the waste-bin. 007 stared at it for a time, and finally decided against picking it up. On the last occasion upon which he had attempted a major stoop, it had taken four osteopaths to unwind him.
‘Good morning,’ said M, ‘if you’re from Maintenance, I’d like you to know that the roller towel is getting harder and harder to tug. I don’t know what they’re doing with them these days. I think they put something in them at the factory. When I was a lad, you could pull them down between thumb and forefinger. Possibly the KGB has a hand in it. Also, I have great difficulty in pulling the soap off that magnetic thingy.’
‘It’s me, sir,’ said Bond, ‘00—’
He frowned.
M stared at him glaucously from nonagenarian eyes.
Bond took off his James Lobb galosh, and removed a slip of paper.
‘7,’ he said. ‘007.’
M trembled suddenly. He tugged at a drawer, but it did not budge.
‘I’ve got a gun in here somewhere,’ he said. ‘By God, you’ll know it when I find it! You’re not 007, you swine, I’ve known 007 fifty years, he’s bright ginger!’