An Audience with an Elephant

by Byron Rogers

  Most afternoons Mr Sparry’s friends crowd into his tiny kitchen to wait for the kettle to boil on the sort of black-leaded range you usually find only in museums. They like tea and they like Mr Sparry who is as strange and amiable a man as ever sidled out of the brain of Mr Charles Dickens. That last sentence shows the effect of Mr Sparry.

  He is 50 years old, small and very thin with long pale features. He walks and talks with a sort of silky stateliness so that the world you know is suddenly a long way off. Mr Sparry’s courtesy and his English are both out of another time (‘My father was a natural singer of harmony, which I much envy’); but then he has chosen to live in another time. By trade he is a second-hand bookseller. There are books piled everywhere on the tables and shelves of what was once the front room of a Victorian terraced house in this Black Country village. A wave redevelopment tore through the terrace, bringing new brick shops, but leaving this one house. It left Mr Sparry, too.

  He inherited the house from his parents, who had inherited it from his grandparents, who, having bought the house in 1910, built the lean-to kitchen. He has kept everything as it was in their times. ‘We were going to have a bathroom built in the 1950s,’ marvelled Mr Sparry, ‘but we never got round to it. Lack of money was the reason then. Now it is simply a lack of interest.’

  He lives alone and coal fires are his only source of heat. He has an electric kettle which his friends insist he uses when they call late at night, but there is no electric boiler or cooker, and the lavatory is outside. The result is that the friends who crowd into this kitchen, most of them men around his own age, find themselves crowding mysteriously into their own childhoods. But it also means that Mr Sparry lives in conditions that would have any landlord pilloried in the popular press.

  ‘It’s a terrible way to live,’ said the Well-informed Man on the Inside of Chimney Stacks. The street door had opened and Mr Sparry had wandered off to investigate that curiosity, a customer who had come into his shop. ‘I put that coal boiler in for him, found him a wooden cover with the old copper nails in as well; and the wash-basin, got him that. Also the boards for his ceiling. The wind used to blow through his slates before that and you could see the sky. I also got his lavatory to work.’

  ‘Mr Hale,’ said Mr Sparry, gliding into the room as though on castors, ‘has done that by twisting the old pipes into a modern cistern.’ The result is a wild art décor design. ‘Did that one afternoon when I was having a cup of tea here,’ said the designer. Mr Hale, said Mr Sparry, was the Man Who Had Twisted The Pipes.

  Mr Hale had earlier talked about his friend. ‘How does he live?’ Mr Hale took a long swig of tea. ‘On potatoes and vegetables. Doesn’t smoke or drink or mess wi’ women. Eats one raw onion a day, and you should see him do that.’ He pointed to a small hatch in the wall. ‘His cat used to come through that until it died last year. Been with him eighteen years.’ The cat’s basket still hangs on the wall, for nothing gets thrown away here.

  Two things underwrite John Sparry’s lifestyle. The first is the economics of the second-hand book trade. Each year he sets out to earn just £2,400, enough to keep him alive and out of sight; any more and Mr Sparry would have to pay income tax. ‘I started doing radio talks about two years ago and that could have wrecked my scheme, but the danger passed. I shall eventually have to make more money but I am placid about it.’ For the moment he has the privacy which only billionaires and the last tramps enjoy. The second thing is his interest in the past. One of his two upstairs rooms is given over to mementoes that he has rescued before the gale of the world could blow them away. He has labelled these neatly in red capitals. MR DUMPHY’S OLD HOLLY LOG. MRS HUDSON’S OLD HAT.

  ‘Mrs Hudson was a very interesting old lady,’ said Mr Sparry. ‘She had a large goitre on her neck, the result of drinking well water. So I kept her hat.’ CYRIL HILL’S RED HANDKERCHIEF. Hill was the local road-sweeper, when he died Mr Sparry kept his handkerchief. ‘So much gets thrown away,’ he said, ‘and this is our history.’ The effect is startling. For a moment you find yourself staring at a folded red handkerchief as though it were something that had belonged to Achilles.

  For, just as the larger world of bureaucrats has no place in Mr Sparry’s own life, so that of conventional historians has no place here. These are not mementoes of public men, for this is the private world of Mr Sparry of which once anything is a part, it casts a giant shadow: the friends by the fire, the handkerchief an old gentleman left, the log someone threw away. Do you understand what this means? This is a house where, as soon as you enter, you find you have lost the anonymity that the late-20th century and its centralised communications network imposes on you. Because of Mr Sparry you feel you are someone here.

  ‘Kettle on?’ A large face had come round the door. ‘Double-glazing,’ muttered Mr Hale from his place by the fire, but Mr Sparry the impresario was waving his long fingers. ‘This gentleman knows all there is to be known about double-glazing,’ he announced. I asked the newcomer if this was so, for I thought they were pulling my leg. ‘Someone has to sell double-glazing,’ he said cheerfully, ‘before that I was in the fish and chip business.’ With great restraint Mr Sparry did not proclaim him the Emperor of Batter.

  There are just four rooms to the house, plus the lean-to kitchen. The front room downstairs contains the books, the front room upstairs, the relics. Mr Sparry sleeps in the back bedroom, a fascinating room full of treasures, such as an old Eagle and a handwritten 1864 Hebrew and Chaldee commentary to the Bible. A Chaldee commentary? ‘A lifetime’s work,’ said Mr Sparry. Over the bed hang four photographs of King Edward’s Stourbridge, the local school he once attended. ‘That’s me’ — a small face is peering round someone else’s shoulders as though a pixie had strayed into the group. Mr Sparry is not in any of the other photographs but they hang over his bed as well. A book beguilingly entitled The Treatment of Trade-Waste Waters and the Prevention of River Pollution will one day be read, since he is interested in reclamation. He is interested in comedians too, and etymologists, and local industrial slang, and teddy bears; he gives talks on each of these to local societies. He keeps notes in labelled plastic bags.

  But it is the back room between kitchen and bookshop that is puzzling, being at odds with the other indices to Mr Sparry. The room is full of drums and xylophones, for Mr Sparry is a jazz musician and part of a group. ‘This drum was autographed by Eric Delaney,’ he said and stopped, puzzled by the lack of reaction. ‘You’ve not heard of Eric Delaney? That is true, is it? You’ve not heard of Eric Delaney?’ Then you begin to appreciate that behind the tea-drinking heroes there is the shadowy outline of even greater men. But such thoughts were interrupted by the door opening as into the kitchen stepped Mr Ray Ashton, The Man Who Bumped into a King. He groaned as he was persuaded to tell the tale — ‘Again?’ said Mr Ashton.

  During the war Mr Ashton was demonstrating the electrical circuit of a car. What sort of day was it? They were in a tent, said Mr Ashton. The ground was uneven, and the King stumbled. He would have fallen had he not collided with Mr Ashton. What had he said to the King? ‘Pardon me.’ And what had the King said to Mr Ashton? ‘Sorry.’

  The Examinee

  OUNDS OF SUMMER: a lawnmower clattering into life, the ragged sound of clapping at a village cricket match, a burst of pop music out of nowhere that you do not wish to hear. But there are other sounds of summer. Close your eyes. Listen. No matter how long ago, 30 years, 50, they are vivid now as ever they were. Silence first, but a silence broken when someone coughs. It is a cough in a large room and it echoes, setting off other sounds. Someone moves his feet. There is a rustle of paper. And then it begins. The metronome of footsteps as a man walks up and down, up and down, between the avenues of desks. Remember now? You are back where you never want to be again, in the examination halls of your youth. You are in the hunting preserve of Mr Terry Tyacke of Trowbridge.

  Mr Tyacke sat an A level this summer, and the press and television crews descended on Trowbridge, fo
r it was his 22nd A level, and in Physical Education, for, after 20 years of exams, he is beginning to run out of subjects. English, Maths and Geography, he stalked these long ago, seeking them out where they lurked in their various examination boards. He has sat so many that if he gets PE, he will be forced to set his sights on something nobody ever sat at A level. Mr Tyacke will take Philosophy.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to have a stab at that for some time, but it’ll be real hard going, that one,’ said Mr Tyacke among his trophies. To be precise, his trophy. On a handwritten piece of notepaper he has recorded subjects, boards, dates and grades.

  It all turns on whether he gets PE. It had been a toss-up whether he would take that or Photography this year. ‘But I didn’t have a camera so I thought that might be a bit of a draw-back with Photography,’ he said with the sort of unanswerable logic that augurs well for Philosophy. Even so, he had not taken into account the practical exam in PE which required him to run the 100 metres in 11 seconds, play in a hockey game and throw the javelin. He thinks he may have clocked 11 seconds for his javelin run-up, but his 100 metres was off all the stop-watches and the examiner forgot to bring an egg timer.

  ‘No. I don’t mind you laughing,’ said Mr Tyacke generously. ‘It’s a game to me, but you have to admit, it’s a very different sort of game from what most people play.’ He became a national figure when, egged on by his twelve-year-old grandson, he entered the Guinness Book of Records, every new edition of which now has updated his growing bag of A levels. That was when the press started calling. ‘Even the Sun rang me up. Gave me a shock that did. I can tell you. Luckily they never rang back, for God knows what they might have dug up about me.’

  It all began 23 years ago when Susan, his only child, was sitting her O levels, and to keep her company, as he puts it, Terry, a Royal Navy shipwright for 22 years, and his wife Morwenna also signed up for what he calls ‘a bundle of O levels’. It is a lovely phrase: you can see the two of them staggering along under the weight. That was the start for the Great Examinee.

  A man who had left school without a single O level had passed fourteen of them when he became aware of an even greater escarpment looming above him, and moved into the foothills of A levels. By now exams had become a way of life for the Tyackes, for when Susan left school to join the Civil Service her parents went on. Every summer there was a new bundle, and when the exams were over they treated themselves to a meal out. Mrs Tyacke died in 1992, but her husband could not abandon the old ways.

  ‘I don’t want to go to university. That’d be too big a commitment. A levels do me, a nine-month job, sign on in September at the local college and then wait. It’s a bit like being pregnant really.’

  Every September the young get younger, and he is a little older. For History he did not even bother to sign on at any educational establishment, but studied that himself (‘I felt I’d lived the bugger’). As for the other subjects, the local college at Trowbridge has a new wing now. Terry feels he has paid for most of it.

  The tiny garden in front of his house is so neat that even before you meet him you appreciate that the man is a perfectionist. He has three hobbies. One is gardening. Another is to follow the fortunes of Arsenal FC with his grandson. The third is exams. It is the neatness about these that appeals to him (‘You pays your money and you get a result’). If there is no result, then his inclination is to turn away, as he did when he failed chemistry at O level, but maths brought out a doggedness in him: he sat and re-sat A level Maths until he got ‘the buggers’. And once Terry Tyacke, in June 1987, got an A. This was in Business Studies.

  ‘I remember when we came out, we were talking about the exam papers and all the others were groaning about things we hadn’t covered. I didn’t say anything for I’d sat Accountancy the year before and I’d covered them in that. Things spill over from one subject to another when you’ve sat as many exams as I have.’ In fact, he knows more about exams than any man living, having sat more of them than any man living, and under more examining boards. Oxford, Cambridge, the Associated Examining Board. He didn’t think he had sat London, said Mr Tyacke, but he couldn’t be sure.

  ‘I remember Young Sir. . .’. This is how he refers to his various tutors who, like his classmates, are getting alarmingly younger. ‘I remember Young Sir suggesting we switch boards for Accountancy and, of course, we were all up in arms. But then he brought in some past papers and I thought, “Hello, this is for me.”’ Mr Tyacke got B for Accountancy under the Oxford board. Playing the field, he subsequently sat Land Geography, Sociology, Economics and Geology under Oxford.

  He does not do well in everything; no man could. Six of his ‘A level’ grades are E, eight of them D, but they are passes all the same. ‘Never mind the quality, feel the width,’ said Mr Tyacke, enlarging on his philosophy of education. ‘I gets most of my books at Oxfam. You go down there in June and July, and Oxfam’s full of books thrown away by people who never want to sit an exam again.’

  I began leafing through the British and European History paper he sat in 1993. ‘Why, despite the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, was there still an Irish Question?’ Mr Tyacke had ticked that. ‘Oh, there’s always an Irish Question,’ he said vaguely. ‘But don’t ask me anything about it. I revises at the last minute and when the exam is over I forgets the lot.’

  Here you have the professional examinee at his most ruthless, jettisoning knowledge like Sherlock Holmes as soon it has no relevance. For, whatever supporters of the system might argue, exams in the end are not about education. They are about exams. Terry agrees. ‘I don’t think it’s the right system. I can sit and swot and pass an exam, but it doesn’t make me clever, just crafty. I watch TV news and I see these kids getting their results and it’s terrible, the pressure on them. There’s no pressure on me. I can go into an exam and I’ve got no nerves, it’s a game. But you should see them . . . and what prospects have they got? If they can do a job, what does it matter how many A levels they’ve got? It’s all wrong to put on a job advertisement, “Don’t apply unless you’ve got four O levels.”’

  Asked whether he had any tips for those taking exams he said he had two. The first was to get hold of as many past papers as possible. The second was to read the questions carefully.

  ‘I remember Sociology. This Young Sir said he was sure a question on divorce would not come up this year, but I had a feeling it might. Yet when I looked at the paper it wasn’t there, not in any of the fourteen questions, of which we had to answer four. Then, when we came out this Young Maid. . .’, this is how Terry Tyacke refers to the girls in his class, so it sounds that he and they are part of a Nursery Rhyme, ‘she said, “You were right, you were right. . .”’. Then Terry realised that there had been a question about divorce, although they hadn’t used the actual word. So, ‘Read the questions. . . I’d been waffling on about trade unions. Blow me, I could have got a C.’

  His age has long ceased being an embarrassment, having become a joke. ‘I’ve seen a fair few librarians and a few caretakers off in my mind, I can tell you.’ He likes the young and they, sensing that this is one grown-up who knows what they are going through, like him. ‘Outside college, you could say I was antisocial, but I have had some good laughs with the other students. Perhaps it’s because I’m just a big kid myself, but the young chap next door, he’s been at the college, said, “Blimey, Terry, don’t you realise you are God to them?”’

  But his career may soon be over, PE had been a shock, though not the written exam. ‘What is blood pressure. How can it be measured?’ At 70 a man knows exactly what blood pressure is and how it can be measured. No, it was the practical, during which he surfaced like the Ghost of Christmas Past. ‘We were playing hockey and I tackled one chap who said, “God, who are you and where did you come from?” I hadn’t encountered anything like that before. I remember my daughter saying, when I told her I was sitting A level English, ‘But you don’t read books.’ I told her you didn’t have to read them for exams, jus
t the beginning, the middle and the bit at the end. But when my grandson heard I was doing PE and had to do all this running and that, he just couldn’t stop laughing.’

  As I write, a man in Trowbridge is trying to make up his mind. Should he call it a day? Or should he go for one last A level? Somewhere out there, beyond reason and what most call common sense, lies Philosophy, which could blow the fuses in a man’s mind. . .

  Come, my friends,

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  Push off, and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows: for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset. . .

  And soon a new term starts.

  Glutton for Punishment

  HAD FOR A LONG time been curious to meet Peter Dowdeswell but, although living just 15 miles away, I had not been to see him. It was probably fear. ‘Ah,’ said Doug Blake knowingly, ‘the Muncher.’ ‘Animal,’ said Tony Hackett down at the pub. ‘The man’s an animal.’ Over the years an image had formed of a cave knee-deep in bones beyond which sat a hunched and terrible shape in the shadows.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I shouted brightly. It was a house on a council estate and beyond the privet hedge a snarling Alsation dog kept pace as I walked up and down the pavement. ‘Hello, anybody home?’ The front door opened. It was a cold, wet night but the man who stood there was naked to the waist, a huge man with more tattoos on him than a Pict. The Blue Man of Earls Barton. The Muncher.

  He was not in a good mood. A national newspaper had taken his picture a week before, promising him £100 for his co-operation in eating eighteen fried eggs while sitting with live chickens on his lap. He had not received the £100. ‘Wild chickens ,’ he roared, waving his arms so that the eagles and the panthers writhed. ‘They shat all over me suit.’