AS YOU may know, we have a by-pass round Cartersfield, and we can now sleep away our days without being disturbed by the thunder of passing lorries and the curses of their drivers as they try to overtake each other at eighty miles an hour along our High Street. Now when they built the thing they had, naturally, to seize land from the various patriots who owned it, compensating them with cash, a procedure which seems to me admirable in every way. Among the many plots seized near Chapman’s Wood was a corner of a field owned by Brigadier Hobson, and though he complained bitterly at the time about the loss of liberty of the subject involved in a compulsory purchase order, we all suspected that he was secretly delighted, since the only function of the field was to make a pleasant surround for his drive, and anyway there was still another field between him and the main road, and who, for God’s sake, ever objects to money? Besides, it was highly unlikely that he could have sold the field for the price the county gave him for one bit of it. And though, following the splendid example of Lady Eden and her remark about the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing-room, he went about saying he was having a main road put through his bedroom, this was so obvious an untruth that everyone just laughed, and he soon forgot the monstrous invasion of privacy of which he had complained.
Well, the by-pass was built, and everyone said how nice it was that you could hear yourself think these days, though the idea that any of them have ever had a thought worth thinking is simply absurd. They are nice, dull people here in Cartersfield, and if they did actually think it would be, to use a phrase Hobson is fond of, simply frightful. When Molly Simpson decided to be a poetess and took up with those awful literary people in Slough and tried to start a Poetry Circle here, it was unspeakably frightful, so I know what I’m talking about. But that’s another story, and the point here is that it really was rather nice to be able to not-think in peace and quiet for a change.
Well, two or three years later Hobson and his wife, who is called Evangeline, poor woman, went off to the Alps for a fortnight and for what he called ‘a bit of walking’, though everyone else suspected that it would be a bit of drinking for him and a bit of quiet knitting for her while they listened to other people talking about the beauty of the gentians. I loathe Switzerland, and only people as wholly devoid of imagination as the Hobsons could possibly enjoy spending a fortnight there in summer, or so I consider. But off they went, and when they came back, around the end of July, it was, as usual, raining, in fact it rained throughout the Bank Holiday week-end with a deliberate dribbling malice.
But it wasn’t the rain that annoyed him. He’d got back to England after that tiresome train journey, he’d reached Cartersfield without losing a single piece of luggage, he’d picked up his car from Trinder’s Garage, and he’d set off to his home with that tremendous English satisfaction at being back in the land of the normal, where everyone understands what you’re saying, and there’s none of that vile insolence from damned foreign waiters. He drove along the by-pass to his driveway, and what he saw when he made the turn must have made him think for a ghastly minute that he was still a protesting victim of woppish and woggish loathsomeness. Because right next to his drive, a few feet beyond his fence, in the next field, there was a huge sign advertising some particularly offensive form of hair tonic, designed for adolescents so that they may win girls and annoy their parents. A young man was grinning inanely down, with the comb still in his hand, his face about ten feet long and his teeth as white as a detergent advertisement, and to his left in big blue letters it said ‘LOOK GROOMED FEEL GROOMED BE GROOMED WITH AXELGREECE’ or whatever the stuff was called.
What Brigadier Hobson said when he first saw it we none of us know, though most of us can make a pretty shrewd guess, but we do know that within minutes he was phoning Jack Solomons who owns the field which had been desecrated. Jack told us about it himself. He came roaring into the Brunswick Arms that night and ordered a double whisky and gave us what he was pleased to call ‘the low-down’. He was laughing so hard he kept spilling his drink, which upset Sam Palmer, the landlord, but between splutters we heard how Hobson had rung him up six times in the last hour, and that Jack had then left his receiver off the hook, not because he wasn’t enjoying Hobson’s explosions, but because he thought it would annoy the old man still more not to be able to address him directly. Then he left his house, and planned to spend the evening moving about from place to place, hoping, wrongly as it turned out, that Hobson would come after him with a whip, and that he would always be one move ahead.
‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ said Jack. ‘Twice he’s threatened to court-martial me, and once to sue me for spoiling his property. He talks like a sergeant-major who’s been reading some law book. You’d never believe the things he says.’
Everyone looked at him, and someone laughed loudly, but on the whole the reaction was indifferent.
‘How much do you get for that sign, Jack?’ said Sam.
‘A nice little bit,’ said Jack, and he laughed some more, though not quite so loudly as before, then he finished his drink and said: ‘Tell him I was here, will you?’
Then he went out. We could hear him starting up his Jaguar, and then he roared off to tell the story somewhere else.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Sam.
‘The Brigadier won’t be in here,’ said Harry Mengel, ‘not bloody likely.’
There was a general agreement.
‘Silly bloody fool,’ said someone, but as no one was quite sure which man he was talking about, no one took him up.
The truth was that no one cared very much for Brigadier Hobson. We tolerated him, and we let him think he was someone important, but we didn’t pay very much attention to him, and we laughed more at him than with him, not that he was much of a man for jokes. He used to come into the Brunswick Arms every Sunday morning after church for a glass of sherry. Sam always said that he was the only man in Cartersfield who ever drank the stuff, and that it was more trouble than it was worth keeping a bottle just for him, but then Sam was lying, of course, because there were always men dropping in, with blonde women of doubtful age tagging along behind them, on their way to or from Maidenhead, and the blonde women always asked for sherry, whatever time of day or night they might happen to be passing through. Anyway, Hobson didn’t spend much time in the Brunswick Arms on other days of the week, and when he did come it was inevitably to the private bar, never to the public one, so we hardly saw him. We’d hear him asking for his sherry and saying: ‘Good morning, Palmer,’ and Sam would wink at us and give him his drink, and then he’d put his head round the partition and say: ‘Good morning,’ and we would all say: ‘’Morning, Brigadier,’ and this always annoyed him, because he wanted us to call him ‘Sir’, but we were damned if we were going to do that, sherry or no sherry. Then his head would go back round the partition again, closely followed by his little white moustache.
But if we didn’t care much for Hobson, we weren’t exactly crazy about Jack Solomons, either. His family have always lived in Cartersfield, and when his father died we all felt quite sorry, because he was a nice man in a way—he ran the drapers’, and though you can never get anything you want in Cartersfield shops, he was quite friendly and open about admitting that he hadn’t got whatever it was you wanted, and that he would really much rather you didn’t ask him to order it for you. Jack was smarter than that, he expanded the store, modernized it a bit, generally chivvied the place up, and now, instead of being a sort of funeral parlour hung with cheap suits, it’s a coffee bar hung with cheap suits, only without the coffee. And he actually presses you to buy something, which his father would never have dreamed of doing, and he goes out of his way to suggest that he can always order what he hasn’t got in stock. Now the whole point about a place like Cartersfield is that you can dream about getting yourself, say, a new suit, without ever thinking you’ll really do so. You go into a shop and look at patterns and rub cloth between your thumb and finger and nod sagely, and then you say: ‘I don’t think
this is quite what I’m looking for, but I’ll think about it,’ and then you go away and don’t think about it, but you do feel virtuous because you have, after all, tried, and when you simply have to get a new suit, you go in and buy one off the peg in ten minutes like everyone else. You can go into a shop without feeling morally obliged to help the shopkeeper make his living, if you see what I mean. But when Jack took over from his father things began to change. And now you find yourself buying something much grander and more expensive than you really want, and though he sells good stuff it’s somehow uncomfortable. For one thing you feel a fool if you walk around in a smart new suit—people aren’t used to that sort of thing in Cartersfield—so you end up with a suit you never wear, still needing a cheap one, but no longer able to pay for it. Basically, I think, we’re the sort of people who like to buy things, but hate having them sold to us. That’s all we have against Jack, really, he makes us feel uneasy. And though we admire him for his push and his go and all the rest of that commercial cant, we don’t really like him. He belongs, perhaps, in a slightly bigger town. He’s tall, and his hands are always a little too clean, and he wears thick-rimmed glasses. It’s those glasses, perhaps, which make us uneasy. His old dad always wore gold-rimmed ones, and we don’t care much for change.
Well, what he’d done was quite simple. Some frightful fellow, as Hobson put it, had come round trying to buy advertising space, or whatever they call it, in the fields along the new bit of road.
‘Had a letter from him myself,’ said Hobson. ‘Wrote and told him what I thought about the idea. Chap never answered.’
But Jack, never slow to see where the good things in life, such as his Jaguar, came from, was much more accommodating to the advertising man, a thickset sad-looking fellow called Richards, and before anyone knew what was happening Richards had arranged for the billboard with its sickening young man to be put up right away, thus giving, though not, I think, intentionally, a terrible shock to old Hobson as he made the turn off the by-pass into his drive.
Now I don’t know what Hobson did that night, after Jack left the receiver off, but next morning he was still exploding with an extraordinary regularity. It was as though the bile springs gushed four times an hour, on the quarter, or like one of those hideous banging things that the idiot children tie to my drain-pipe every Guy Fawkes Night. I have earplugs, actually, not that the idiot children know that, but not even earplugs could have silenced Hobson. So incensed was he that he was prepared to stoop, to let his principles slide, to make any and every effort to get moral support against Jack. He wanted, it seemed, to have him ostracized, or, as he put it, ‘exported’. We met, as it happened, outside the Brunswick Arms, and for five minutes he gave me a pithy and extremely unfair statement of the situation as he saw it, not that he could see very much that morning, blind as he was with rage.
When he’d temporarily calmed down, though the springs of bile continued to gurgle away, we went into the public bar, since I was leading the way. Hobson looked a little startled when he saw where he was, no doubt remembering hours in the sergeants’ mess, but he looked round and said ‘Good morning’ affably enough to the two or three soaks who were there.
‘Ah, Palmer. Good morning to you.’
‘Good morning, Brigadier,’ said Sam, trying not to look surprised to see Hobson and me together. ‘A glass of sherry?’
‘Make it two halves,’ I said.
At this Sam looked incredulous. The feud which Hobson and I had been conducting for several years in a desultory fashion was well known. We never actually came out and told each other to our faces that we hated each other’s guts, but our relations were, as they say, strained. We represent, in our different ways, the radical and the reactionary as far as these exist in a place like Cartersfield. Harry Mengel, who is an active radical, doesn’t really count, because he’s interested in national affairs. Hobson and I never lowered ourselves to discuss anything but local issues. However, there are occasions when left and right may join together to defeat the machinations of the centre, and both will, given a chance, cite the same general principles—preservation of the landscape, individual liberty and various other meaningless phrases designed to cover personal interest with a high-sounding mess of platitudes. When one is really furious about something, there is always some principle which one can use to gain the support of all those men and women who regard themselves as right-thinking. For sheer political humbug I don’t think the British can be beaten.
When we’d sat down at a table with our beer, and when Sam had stopped raising his eyebrows at me behind Hobson’s back, I said: ‘It’s a sign of the times, Brigadier.’ He failed to see the joke, so I said: ‘A bad business, Brigadier, a bad business.’ It’s one of my favourite phrases when talking to the protagonist of a particularly ridiculous row.
Hobson looked at me and snorted. ‘Bad? It’s absolutely monstrous!’ Then he lowered his voice and leaned across the table towards me, trailing, I noticed with detached delight, his cuff in a beer puddle. ‘I say, Drysdale,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I ask you rather a ticklish question?’
I felt like saying ‘No’, for the sheer hell of it, and in remembrance of our past differences, but since I was, on the whole, on his side, and in any case wanted to know what kind of question he thought ticklish, I said: ‘Of course, Brigadier, anything you like.’
‘This fellow Solomons—is he—you know?’
‘I don’t quite follow your question, Brigadier.’
He blushed, for which I suppose I ought to give him credit, and then he cleared his throat and said: ‘I mean—is he—you know—one of the tribe?’
‘Do you mean,’ I said, raising my voice, and enjoying myself watching him blush still more, ‘is he Jewish?’
He nodded and coughed.
Now if there’s one thing to which I am unalterably opposed it is racial prejudice of any kind, including any prejudice against my own mongrel breed, and if it had been anyone other than Hobson I might have got extremely angry. But since it was Hobson, and since it gave me yet another argument against him, for which I might later be grateful, I was only moderately angry. I didn’t, you see, expect our alliance to last. However, I held him in suspense for a moment or two, then I shook my head and said: ‘No, Brigadier. Jack Solomons is every bit as British as you or I.’
Hobson winced. He drank his beer and wiped his moustache. ‘Hmm. Name sounds Jewish.’
Well, I don’t know or care about anyone’s antecedents, and how can one be certain about a thing like that? It’s my own private belief that there will be no peace and quiet in the world until every man, woman and child is a complete racial stew, with fair hair, slanted eyes, black skin, hooked nose and aboriginal sin. And I also suspect that anyone who calls himself English is, as likely as not, fortunate not to know who his great-grandparents were. We all, I hope, have a little bit of foreign matter in us somewhere. Way back, perhaps, but somewhere.
So I said: ‘There’s no doubt about it, Brigadier. I knew his father and mother, and two more English people it would be impossible to find.’
‘Pity,’ said Hobson. Then he realized he shouldn’t have said it, and asked me if I’d have another.
So we had another, and this time he spoke at great length about the perfidy, treason, tastelessness and general caddishness of Jack Solomons.
‘It’s not,’ he said, ‘merely that this frightful thing is next to my own property, though I find that particularly offensive. It’s the whole question of saving the English landscape from vandals. I rang up the Council for the Preservation of Rural England this morning. Tommy Doyle has something to do with it. Entirely on my side, of course, entirely. He’s going to look into it. See what he can do. And then these things are dangerous, you know. People take their eyes off the road. Damned dangerous.’
‘Bloody dangerous,’ I said.
‘People can’t be allowed to go round putting up damned great billboards. Absolute disgrace. I’ve written to the Member. And the l
ocal paper. I rang up Harold Gwatkin this morning—he’s on the county council, you know—and he’s going to see what he can do. Have to use every means to stop this sort of thing.’
Now, as I’ve said, Brigadier Hobson and I would certainly never vote for the same man for any political office, even if I voted, which on the whole I don’t, except to register my disgust with the current bunch of politicians. I usually take the line that both sides are unspeakable, and that what we need is either some form of primitive anarchy or total government control, and I get a certain pleasure from hearing my self called ‘irresponsible’. But this time I was glad our MP was a Tory, and that Gwatkin, a notorious semi-Fascist who runs simply as an anti-Socialist (a pretty apt term for him, if you ask me), were on the currently governing side. I have never heard of Tommy Doyle except on that occasion, but no doubt he was one of the same crew, and anyway Hobson was always mentioning people of whom no one had ever heard, as though they were household names.
You may very well ask why I was on Hobson’s side in all this. Well, basically, I regard advertising as the most obnoxious manifestation of a capitalist system, and while we continue to live under such a system I will fight advertising in every way I can, which is to say by giving my unflinching moral support to anyone who has more courage than I in denouncing it. I see no reason, I might add, why smug young men should be allowed to sit on their well-tailored behinds in London and decide what we all want to buy and how we want it to be wrapped up. The whole thing is a fraud, anyway. Whoever changed his brand of toothpaste because he saw another one advertised? I have used the same brand as long as I can remember, I have stuck with it through various abominations, through peppermint, chlorophyll, and everything else, and I don’t ever intend to change. Not that I like it particularly, but because I am sure it’s just as bad as the others, and why should I change? Advertising is, in my opinion, obtrusive, immoral, offensive, tasteless, undesirable and all the rest of it. So I was on Brigadier Hobson’s side.
A Disturbing Influence Page 8