by Alan Coren
And now, as Mrs Forster swoons, the scene dissolves to another sturdy London villa, another soft March morning, exactly 120 years later, and another great botanist. On this occasion, his is the trembling bosom. He is staring at a polythene cloche tantalizingly fogged by condensation. He is, in apt concord with everything round him, rooted to the spot. Why is he not budging?
To find out, we must, having teleported ourselves this far, now go back six months, to an evening in September when the great botanist went to fill his dustbin, and found his Howea Forsteriana standing beside it. His wife had thrown it out, on the grounds that it was dead. The great botanist brought it back inside, on the grounds that one green frond was still hanging on, and observed to his wife that you wouldn’t bin a canary with 90 per cent moult. You would attempt to revive it.
His wife said it was horrible to look at. The botanist, while forced to agree that the item could no longer be classed as decor, maintained that this was no reason to murder it. He had enjoyed a happily symbiotic relationship with the plant for ten years; when he breathed out, it breathed in, and vice-versa. They were mates. If you will not have it in the house, said the botanist, I shall stick it in the garden. At this, his wife selected a sharp snort from her professional repertoire, and pointed out that his moribund friend was a sensitive tropical soul who would not last five minutes out there.
The botanist glared at her for a bit, and slunk off to phone Kew. No chance, Kew corroborated, and went on to tell him more about William Forster than he thought he’d ever need, but there you are, journalism is full of surprises, you never know your luck. Most to the point, they said that Lord Howe Island did not know the meaning of the word frost.
But the great botanist did not know the meaning of the word defeat. In a sheltered southern corner of his garden, he either planted or buried the palm, depending on whether he or his wife was telling it. He then put a polythene cloche over it, leaned a sheet of plate glass against it, and, in due course, watched the snow fall on it.
That is why, this March morning, he cannot budge. He dares not. Could be a corpse underneath. But he is not the great Forster’s heir for nothing. He girds his loin; moves the glass; lifts the cloche.
There is a palm-tree there. It has new green stalks, and new green leaves. It has not merely survived the winter, it has thrived on it. This is the Tropic of Cricklewood. The great botanist does not, however, pause to preen. He runs to the dustbin.
They had a mango last night, and some fool threw away the pip.
68
Fabric Conditioning
I sat next to Peter Palumbo a year or so ago, at one of those nominally informal bunfights where ‘Just a Few Close Friends’ is hand-scribbled on the embossed paste board, and when you get there two liveried footmen shuck you from your Pakamac and the third shouts your name into a room containing most of the Almanack de Gotha, half the cabinet, and a shoal of tycoons not yet on remand, and you immediately begin asking yourself what your host thinks it is you’ve got that one of his other guests wants, because you were not born yesterday.
Anyway, Palumbo was an agreeable enough cove, he didn’t spill anything on me or try that trick with the cutlery where you bang the spoon and the fork does a somersault, and I was therefore not surprised to learn, a few months later, that he had been made chairman of the Arts Council; if you keep going to informal dinners with Just a Few Friends night after night, and don’t knock over the potted palms, you have only yourself to blame when the scrap of paper that unexpectedly falls out of your hat in the homegoing Roller turns out to have a black spot on it.
Especially if you cannot forbear from banging on publicly about the Cultural Fabric of the Nation: it is the one phrase of his I recall from that night’s exchanges, and each time he loosed it, I rose snapping to the fly, ticking off the threat to that fabric, i.e., to theatre, film, music, books, painting – and, by Stilton time, to glove-puppetry and synchronized origami – from the Philistine hordes yomping behind a Delilah whose manic shears were cutting everything in sight. Palumbo’s eyes would glaze excitedly at each new convoluted metaphor, oddly like those of a man attempting to remember a previous engagement, but whether my shafts were scoring it was not only impossible to say, it did not really matter, since I had no idea, then, that he would ever be in a position to do anything about them.
Indeed, the meeting lay forgotten until I opened last Friday’s Times, where, lurking at the foot of page 5, was the phrase ‘the Arts Council’s plan to restore the cultural fabric of the nation by the year 2000’. Hallo, I thought, its new Akela cleaves unswerving to his mission, there will be a bob or two in this for hack and mummer, might I not be of even further assistance than last time? I phoned the Arts Council.
‘This cultural fabric,’ I said, ‘what, precisely, does it . . .’
‘To quote the chairman,’ said the Arts Council, ‘cathedrals are the greatest cultural glory of this country. He plans to refurbish their fabric by means of a full partnership between the public and private sectors. Other major public buildings, too, of course . . .’
I put the phone down. Bloody buildings. The man had not listened to a word I’d shrieked. He was a literalist: to him, fabric was no metaphor. New conks for gargoyles was what he was after, and a bit of Brasso on the weathercock. Naturally, the private sector would cough up for that: there is nothing iffy about a cathedral, shareholders will not leap up at AGMs and complain about chucking a million at York Minister. On the contrary, it is no bad thing for a board to be seen as God’s benefactors, it is a corking plea in mitigation should their hands get trapped in the till, it has a thick edge over backing unframed paintings or unrhymed verse or unknighted actors.
And what irks me almost as much is that, even for the literalist, cathedrals should top the list when our cultural fabric is under charitable review. Someone will always look after cathedrals. Had I identified, that night, the true bee in Palumbo’s bonnet, I should have turned myself into the Spirit of Cultural Fabric Yet to Come, dragged him down to Cricklewood, made him cringe at butchered conversion and greenfield encroachment, at junkfood facia and bunkered parking, at jerrycobbled estate and polystyrene precinct; I should have cocked his ear to the curfew tolling the knell of parting suburbia.
Bit late now. The window of opportunity has slammed, and one of the very few shortcomings of mock-mullioned double-glazing in snugfit cedarette surround is you can’t hear anyone shouting through it.
69
Numbers Racket
You will, of course, remember the opening sequence of A Matter of Life and Death. How could you not? It was a seminal moment in the history of telecommunications. No one who cares about phones could ever forget it. I wonder sometimes whether even Powell and Pressburger realized the magnitude of what they had stumbled upon: they probably thought they were just making a film about life and death.
The credits fade to reveal David Niven, piloting his bomber back from Germany. Things are not good. The Germans have taken exception to being assaulted by an actor in a cardboard Lancaster, and set fire to it. Furthermore, Niven has suffered a nasty head wound, as the result of heavy ketchup over the Ruhr. He is not going to make it back. We know this from his smile. It is the smile of a man whose director has just suggested that he should appear to have met with Triumph and Disaster and to be treating those two impostors just the same, though not for much longer.
It is at this point that he begins to trawl the ether, seeking some sympathetic voice to say pip-pip to. But nothing negotiates the RT save static – until, suddenly, a girl’s voice crackles. It is Kim Hunter, a toothsome American wireless operator: as they chat, her bee-stung mouth trembles, her velvet eyes brim, and, even though the skipper has never seen her and can have no inkling that Miss Hunter is a little stunner, they fall in love. It is her voice which enraptures him. It is the last thing he hears as he goes into his terminal plummet.
What follows is two hours of fey tosh, with Niven dangling in limbo while supernal advocates di
spute whether he is alive or dead, until he is duly redeemed by the love of the operator and allowed to resurrect. But none of that mattered. I knew this even at the age of 10, when I tottered, blinking, from the Southgate Odeon. What mattered was the core-truth; which was that you never knew who you might run into at the telephone exchange.
For four decades, that notion of limitless possibility sustained me. Nor – which has not always been the case with other dreams – did disillusion lie in wait for it with a sockful of sand. I have had some delightful natters, oft in the stilly night, with operators; many a chat, flirtatious, comical, subversive, has warmed the wires between us. Could be directory enquiries, who, as their wet thumb flicked the pages, would rabbit revealingly of this and that; could be some reverse-chargehand answering with a mouthful of pork pie, and before you knew it you were into an engaging exchange about nocturnal indulgence; could be just one of those who happened to be giggling as they connected, and you said what’s the joke, and she said we’re having a bit of a laugh down here, Denise is getting married Wednesday to this bloke with a peculiar walk, and from there it was but a short step to intimate conspiracies.
It’s all over now. There is not a human being left at the nation’s switchboards, save the handful required to press the buttons which activate BT’s androids. Any enquiry is answered by a computerized thing. The thing says ‘sorry, the number you want is ex-directory’, or ‘sorry, the number you want is unobtainable’, or ‘the cellphone subscriber you have dialled is away from his instrument at this time’. Last evening, after a thing gave me a number, I dialled it, and another thing said: ‘You have been answered by a fax-link. Please fax now, or hold for a telephone connection.’ It then played most of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik before putting me through to a third thing which said: ‘Sorry, the number has been changed to . . .’
This is a bad business. In the Next Lot, when I am limping home with the tailplane shot away and my chute in tatters, what shall I hear when I punch the plaintive button? ‘Sorry, this number has been changed to a fax-link and the subscriber is away from the instrument at this time, but if you would care to leave your name and code and number after the Toccata and Fugue, we shall try to get back to you as soon as . . .’
70
Eight Legs Worse
The other evening, I found myself looking at what appeared to be a tiny broken bagpipe. It was leaking. It was, furthermore, leaking something black, and, furthermost, lying in what it was leaking. None of this would have mattered much had I found myself looking at it in, say, a gutter or hospital pedal-bin. I should merely have shuddered and walked on, but what I found myself looking at it in was a dish. The dish was on a table in front of me, flanked by knives, forks, and spoons; in short, all the accoutrements required if what you were going to do with a tiny broken bagpipe was not shudder and walk on, but eat it. Not that there was any if about it. I was a guest. The tiny bagpipe had been cooked by my hostess.
All the other guests had one, too, and they were uniformly thrilled by them.
‘Oh, wow,’ they cried, ‘squid!’
‘Stuffed squid,’ they elaborated, ‘oh, wow!’
‘In its own ink!’
‘Oh, wow!’
I looked at mine. I gave it a little prod with my fork. Ink ran out of it. Though not a household name where marine biologists foregather, I know why the squid has ink in it. It is so that it can squirt it out to put off predators attempting to eat it.
It works.
Not, mind, that it seemed to bother the others. They could not wait to tuck in. They sliced off the tentacles, they sectioned the body, they spooned up the ink, to choral yumming and oohing punctuated by brief autobiographical solos about how they’d always wanted to cook squid, it looked so wonderfully marbled, but they’d never dared, were they alive when you bought them, how did you kill them, how did you clean them, how did you stuff them, how did you find out how to . . .
My points exactly, as a matter of fact; though not, with me, uttered ecstatically, just brooded on internally. As, indeed, they had been with the first course, shorba, when everyone had shrilled, oh wow, isn’t this that fantastic Yemeni marrowbone soup, yes it is, oh what’s it called . . .
But I had managed to get that down all right. I had succeeded in persuading myself that wherever the marrow had been extruded, it was unlikely to have been from camel bones. I didn’t think you could buy camel bones in Barnes. I would have heard. There were little fibrous lumps floating about in it, mind, that could have been goat, possibly hare (I looked up the recipe when I got home), but I managed to corral them under my reversed spoon, and I don’t think anyone noticed.
Now, do not misinterpret all this gustatory whingeing: I am no culinary philistine, I have tied on the bib at many an ethnic bistro and not shrunk from having a cockshy at the arcane, even when I have not had the slightest idea what yukyuk or bugatti were and the patron lacked the bilingualism to convey. I have probably eaten wild toad in a wart sauce and held up my plate for more. I may even have been asked on the drive home whether I liked the stuffed nostril and not stopped the car to throw up. It is not a question of squeamishness over this exotic dish or that, only one of suspicion and unease when faced with the ambitions of the amateur. For while it is one thing to order tiger stew from an Ulan Bator restaurateur with three rosettes in the Mongolian Michelin, it is quite another to have it ladled out before you in Stoke Newington by an English ophthalmologist whose hobby is deciphering oriental cookbooks.
And there is a lot of that about, these days. The British – released from esculent restraint by both the Elizabeth David watershed and the immigration of countless entrepreneurs carrying woks, pasta-makers, clay ovens, bains marie, fondue sets, spice-mills, and all the rest, and bent under sacks of enigmatic herbs, vats of curious oils and liquors and yoghurts, and unfathomable lengths of dried animal – have become the acolytes of a hundred different cuisines, eager not merely to patronise the myriad professional establishments but, God help us, to emulate them to the best of their domestic ability.
A best which is not always good enough. While I applaud the ambition to cobble a yasaino nimono or a cocida madrileno, I have to say that admiration has too often wilted at the first forkful to leave me with anything but doubt concerning the frenzied competitiveness which currently holds the middle-class dinner-party circuit in thrall. I used to motor forth of a Saturday night thinking, good-oh, she’s bound to kick off with that terrific salmon mousse of hers, hit us with a roast saddle of lamb to follow, and bring up the rear with a bread-and-butter pudding that would have Anton Mosimann putting the Sabatier to the wrist, but I do not think that any longer; these days I think, oh hell, she was talking abut Uzbek cooking when we met at that dinner party where I had to spit the bits of birds’ nest into my napkin, I bet she’s going to give us stuffed head of something after the larch-leaf purée, and he never stops going on about being something of a fromoisseur, ha-ha-ha, he’s probably found this amazing dog’s cheese which you have to wash down with emulsified arak, I shall no doubt be on my back in Bart’s tomorrow with a ‘nothing by mouth’ placard gummed to my drip.
It isn’t just the cooking, either; it is the trust one is required to have in what went on before they got to the cooking, which is why, when that other evening someone asked how you cleaned a squid, I had a long pull of the Meursault and tried to think about something else. God knows what there is inside a squid. I remembered once watching poulpeurs preparing to market their catch on the Marseilles waterfront: they killed the squid by sticking their thumbs in the beaks and turning the bodies inside out, whereupon they chucked the entrails back in the sea, because there were poison sacs inside. Had my Barnes hostess known enough to do that?
I wasn’t sure. So I just ate the tentacles. ‘Phew,’ I said, when the plates came to be collected and an eyebrow raised itself over my little legless bagpipe, ‘That was one big squid! Do you know, I couldn’t manage another bite.’
71
Do Dilly
-Dally on the Way
You will groan (and who could blame you?) to recall my obsessive search, passim, for a Cricklewood hero. So let me lift your spirits: the search is over. After today, you will hear no more of it. Even if other local prodigies turn up as unexpectedly as this one, they shall not test your patience. I am satisfied, now, to let the matter rest, along with the blessed remains of a paragon whose ineffable rightness for me and Cricklewood sets her immovably above any putative contender.
Heroine, then. And those remains lie not 200 yards from my very gate, though I didn’t know this until yesterday, despite having passed them umpteen times on as many short cuts through the cemetery at the top of the road. But yesterday’s was a long cut: as I negotiated the wonky crosses, February suddenly did what February suddenly does, so, lacking an umbrella, I shot under a maple tree to wait for it to stop doing it. I was not alone, for that is the way it is in graveyards, but I did not immediately spot who was beside me, because the moss lay thick in the chisellings. It was only when I thought I saw what I subsequently knew I had that I ran my finger down the grooves to ream them out, and read: ‘In loving memory of Marie Lloyd, born February 12, 1870, died October 7, 1922.’ Even then, and even as the fingers trembled, I couldn’t be sure it was her – that her, I mean. And then I read the mottled verse beneath.
Tired she was, and she wouldn’t show it.
Suffering she was, and hoped we didn’t know it.
But He who loved her knew, and, understanding all.