by Alexei Sayle
My name is Hillary Wheat, I am seventy-two years old, I came to the Northamptonshire village of Lyttleton Strachey thirty years ago and I am still nowhere near fitting in. I don’t want you to think this is the cliché of rural suspicion towards outsiders. It is just me.
The couple who live in the other semi-detached house joined to mine, a pop-eyed pair of social workers called Mike and Michaela Talmedge, have a sixteen-year-old daughter called Suki. Suki has a boyfriend called Bateman who is a six foot three inches tall, cross-dressing black man with dyed blue hair and a ring through his nose. With her parents’ enthusiasm Bateman has come to live with Suki in the parents’ house, in her childhood bedroom, still hung with Take That posters. On summer afternoons with the windows open I can hear them having mildly perverted sex, the crack of leather on black man. Bateman fitted right in.
No matter how hard I have tried to shake it off there is some quality that hangs over me of diffidence, taste, restraint, politeness, that really, really, annoyed the inhabitants of Lyttleton Strachey. In the village pub, which our mad quacking landlady had re-named The People’s Princess after the famous traffic casualty, I would enter to mumbled ‘How do’s …’ then sit quiet and annoying in the corner with a flat pint of Hook Norton Bitter. ‘Bitter?’ the duck landlady would ask when I entered.
‘A little …’ I would always reply (apart from a ‘no, more rueful I would say …’ phase in the early Eighties). It just made people angry. Even couples who had motored over from Banbury and had never been in the pub before felt a frisson of irritation at my entrance.
By contrast Bateman would blast in, dressed in a ball gown worn over lycra cycling shorts, usually shouting the catchphrase from some television commercial, and all the lads, Marty Spen, Paul Crouch, Miles Godmanchester, Ronny Raul, would be pleased as punch to see him. There would be shouts and banter and lots of admiring questions for the black man about what it was like to be a black man or a black woman.
If I had been some sort of spy my diffident qualities would have stood me in good stead in Lyttleton Strachey. But I’m not a spy, I’m just a lonely old man.
A lonely old man in exile. At least when the Tsars sent their troublesome citizens to Siberia they had others there to greet them, to argue with, to go hunting with, to make love to and the possibility of escape. It always sounded like a rather nice winter break to me, excellent après ski, dancing lessons from Leon Trotsky, a talk on penguins by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a sort of Sandals of the Steppes.
But I am my own gaoler so there is no escape.
My name is Hillary Wheat, I am seventy-two years old and once, a long time ago, I was what the newspapers called a ‘well known poet’. I was never avant garde, preferring clear simple words about love and buttons and buses, that rhymed. God forgive me but I also used my popularity to distend myself into a celebrity. The television made an hour-long film about me that was shown at prime time on the BBC, this being in the time when they used to force feed self-improving stuff down the public’s gullet, hoping to swell their brains like Sam crammed bits of their relatives and diseased swill down the gullets of his poor animals. I also had my own weekly radio programme and once made an advert for breakfast cereal in which there was an amusing play on my surname. Wheat.
My descent into Northamptonshire began some time during 1968 and a lunch with my publisher, the late Blink Caspari, of Caspari and Millipede. For some time I had been having difficulty in contacting him. His secretary kept saying he was ‘in a meeting’.
Lying in this way was a business practice recently imported from the United States, like time and motion studies, so that when she said he was in a meeting I thought he was actually in a meeting. ‘He’s in more meetings than the general secretary of the TUC,’ I joked. You may not remember it but the TUC was a powerful organisation back then, for trade unionists, run by a man with strange hair. (It occurs to me I should perhaps explain what trade unionists used to be. But then where would I stop? Threepenny bits? Moral rearmament? Emotional inhibition? Ministerial responsibility? Sexual restraint?)
After a lot of phone calls I had managed to get my publisher to invite me to lunch at a restaurant in Camden Town that Blink described over the phone as ‘sort of France at the time of the First World Warrey’. It was down some stairs.
I said to Blink as we went down the stairs, ‘I thought when you said it was France at the time of the First World War you meant a Belle Époque sort of thing, a return to the classicism of Escoffier.’
‘No, what I meant,’ said Blink, ‘is that it’s France during the First World War.’
By this time we were in what I supposed was the restaurant. I stared about me. We had passed through a door into another time. The underground room we had entered was a re-creation of a brasserie in the centre of a town in Northern France sometime in the middle of the year’ 1917, right in the middle of the First World War. The café had seemingly a few hours before taken a number of direct hits from a salvo of high explosive shells. Jagged holes had been blasted through the walls in several spots, giving views of distant, badly painted underground fields, the shell holes had been, apparently, hastily half-filled with sandbags. Two old-fashioned Vickers machine guns were mounted on top of the sandbags, belts of ammunition coiling from their cocked breeches. There had been a recent firefight between the shop window dummies of the Allied powers and the shop window dummies of the Central powers: casualties lay blood-splattered in the uniforms of the German, French and British armies, sprawled in stiff attitudes of death across the bags of sand.
All the waiters were got up to look like members of the French general staff and the tables and chairs were rough hewn, shrapnel-blasted mismatches such as would be found in any bunker. On each table there was an old-style field telephone that you could wind up and speak to anybody who took your fancy at another table, these field telephones were taking seriously the current injunction to ‘Make Love Not War’. Playing on a continuous tape loop via speakers buried in the walls was the crump and whine of artillery. Every half an hour there was a small explosion of smoke and sparks from beyond the sandbags.
It occurs to me now, thirty-odd years later, that each period interprets the past in its own particular way. So though to myself and Blink (and I expect to the many survivors of the Great War who were still bumbling around in that year of 1968) the brasserie looked utterly authentic, viewed from our own age, from now, the place would appear irredeemably 1 960s. And if anybody at this moment would wish to make a brand-new, bombed-out, early twentieth century brasserie, it would look very different.
‘You were in the last war weren’t you, Hillary?’ said Blink as we sat down.
‘No, too young.’
‘You fought somewhere though, didn’t you? I’m sure you did. Had a life-changing experience somewhere, there was a poem about it I’m certain.’
‘Yes, Kenya, ‘52, ‘53.’
‘No heebie jeebies though?’
‘Not so as you’d notice.’
‘Ah good. I suddenly got a bit worried this place might bring it back … if you’d been in France and if there was anything to bring back. Lot of the teachers at my prep school were the most barking mad fellows from the first war, gibbering and crying at all hours and trying to grab your cock in the showers.’
‘I don’t think war is very much like this,’ I said.
‘No, I don’t suppose it is,’ said Blink.
‘You in the war, Blink?’
‘In the war? Not really. Old enough but medically unfit. Asthma. Eventually after a lot of badgering friends of the family they gave me command of an anti-aircraft gun in Regents Park, in the evenings after work. Do you remember at the start of the war, before things got organised, they let groups of chums form up Home Guard anti-aircraft batteries together? I was in charge of a bofors gun manned by the most ferocious pack of modernist architecture students from the Architects Institute in Portland Place. Spent most of my time stopping them from taking potshots at old buildings
that they violently disapproved of! Still not entirely sure they didn’t blow up the old Abelard and Helois department store in Oxford Street, one minute it was there then the next…’ He paused while a shell in stereo seemed to whistle overhead, then went on. ‘… Well, it was still there but it had a lot of really big holes in it and it was on fire and I can’t say I remember the sound of any planes overhead or the sirens going off or anything. Still it was a frightful old Victorian pile, better off without it. I think it’s an Arts Lab now.’ Then, studying the menu which was printed on maps showing the movements of great armies across the plains of Picardy, ‘What’ll you have, old man?’
I remember I felt myself to be another anachronism. I had dressed that morning in my second-best town clothes: a navy chalk-stripe single-breasted suit made by my tailors in Savile Row, club tie, cream Gieves and Hawkes shirt, silver cufflinks from Aspreys, Church’s black Oxford lace ups, silk socks, cashmere navy-blue overcoat, on my wrist my father’s old Smiths watch. All a mistake, silly vain old peacock. Dapper I might have looked standing by the Cenotaph or somewhere similarly old fellowish but not in that place. I looked like I was lunching my son, perhaps as a well done for getting his first top-ten disc or to celebrate him choreographing his first nude musical, despite the fact that Blink was ten years older than me.
Once we had ordered and General Petain or possibly Marshall Foch had thrown our first course down in front of us, I said, ‘So, Blink, I wanted to talk to you about where the firm sees me going in the next few years.
Blink stared unblinkingly into my eyes.
‘And I want you to look around, Hillary, the times they are a’ changin’.’
Obediently I looked around as I had been told to. It seemed to me more than changin’, the times were a’ gettin’ all a’ jumbled up. As was the new fashion, several of the young men and even the young women at the other tables were wearing bright red Edwardian Royal Guardsmen’s tunics. They looked as if they had somehow slipped through time into the wrong war and although there were newspapers on sticks to be read they were all from February 1917.
‘Yes, if you say so, Blink.’
‘Caspari and Millipede has to change with them. Pan global corporatisation is coming whether we like it or not and as of next month Caspari and Millipede will be folded into the publishing arm of the Deutsche Submarine Corporation.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
‘Now our top money people have looked at the figures for this merger from top to bottom and they say they can’t see any way at all that it won’t be total and absolute financial suicide but all the leading futurologist watchers say that pan global corporatisation is the coming thing, so we can’t afford to be left behind. Hillary, Hillary, I assure you, you will not notice the difference. There will be absolutely no changes … except that the publishing department will be moving to Hounslow, authors’ editors will be drawn from a poo1 rather than assigned individually and our poetry list will be slimmed down considerably. On the upside you do get reduced-price travel on West German and Danish ferries.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said again. ‘You know that I’ve been with Caspari and Millipede since the mid Fifties, your father signed me to the firm. I’m bewildered that he’s gone along with all this.’
‘I know, remarkable isn’t it? But be assured that Dad-dad agrees with me one hundred and fifty-seven per cent.’
Indeed remarkable, since, apart from any other considerations, Paul Caspari had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic during the convoy war and when he amongst the survivors had bobbed to the freezing surface they had been machine-gunned by the lurking German submarine. What I couldn’t be aware of at the time was that Paul Caspari was, with good reason, extremely frightened of his son. Not expecting any opposition, Blink had simply told his father that the firm, which he had founded, would be taken over by the DSC. Blink was shocked when the father had for once objected and said that maybe they should think about it. The son had had to roll on the floor spitting and screaming and tearing great chunks of foam Out of the furniture with his teeth to try and get his own way, and when even that hadn’t worked he’d run at his father and punched him hard on the nose, blood and bone flying everywhere. Apparently everybody else at the board meeting had been terribly embarrassed.
When you know all this, it makes it a lot less surprising that Blink was murdered by his own adopted son a few years later, clubbed to death with a hammer.
You can’t stroll down to the shops here in the country like you can in a town. Everybody in Lyttleton Strachey, apart that is from me, likes to do their shopping once a month in one of the out of town superstores that encircle nearby Banbury like Visigoth encampments. On coming home with the carrier bags in the boot of the hatchback they cram their elephant-coffin-sized freezers with ready meals to be defused later in the microwave. The extra time they save by doing all their shopping in one place at one time is used, as far as I can tell, to argue about money with their wives, download child porn from the internet or simply to drool spittle onto the dining-room table.
Briefly a deluded couple with a dangerous dream came down from London and opened a shop in the village offering for sale fresh local produce and poultry from nearby farms, daily deliveries of fish and organic stone-ground bread, all of it beautifully presented with elegant hand-written little notes. The inhabitants of Lyttleton Strachey could hardly contain their horror at the abomination that was come into their midst and all, again apart from myself, boycotted the place with a rare unanimity and determination of purpose. The shop soon went broke and closed down. The husband hanged himself from the oak tree on the village green, which many reckoned was no more than he deserved for trying to make them eat notfrozen peas.
Sam the farmer went one better than the other villagers and did all his shopping in Northern France at a huge discount warehouse called Mutantsave somewhere outside of Arras. This was not an easy option for him to take: Sam did not speak any French and refused to learn, so in the French discount warehouse he often had no idea what he was buying. Sam only knew there was a lot of it and it was cheap. He had once had a violent fist fight with an Algerian over the one remaining gigantic drum of something called ‘Akkaspekki’ priced at a dazzling FF 28. Sam still had no idea what the stuff was for, nevertheless he knew the answer would come to him one day, he just hoped it would be before September 2009 when the akkaspekki had to be ‘à consommer’ by. Even when he was fairly certain that what he had bought was food, Sam and Mrs Sam had only the vaguest notion what the ‘Conseils de Preparation’ were. Dinners at the Sams had often consisted of raw Paella Royale avec Volaille et fruits de mer or boiled pheasant until they had begun inviting me to dinner so that I could translate cooking instructions. It was a measure of my loneliness that I went.
Sam the farmer had another reason for shopping in France apart from parsimony: it gave him an excuse to go somewhere in his car. In the thirty years that I had lived opposite him he had become rich. Since the hard working hairdressers and photographers’ assistants of the European Community had started giving a slice of their income to Sam he had more money than the Sultan of Brunei’s brother Prince Jefrey would know what to do with, but coupled with a farmerly dislike of ostentation. Luckily the motor industry had developed a type of car for the likes of him. ‘Q’ cars the motor magazines called them after the disguised German merchant ships that would sashay around neutral waters in a trollopy way enticing allied warships to get too close then flipping back their sides to reveal dangerous guns. ‘Q’ cars were ordinary family saloons but fitted with powerful turbo-charged engines, sports suspensions and four-wheel drive; in shades of pale colours they looked the same as plain motors yet screamed past Porsches on the motorway. Sam’s first was a 4x4 Cosworth Sierra, then a Lotus Carlton 3.6 litre twin turbo, now he had a Subaru Impreza Turbo P1, 280 bhp, 4 wheel drive, 0 to 60 in 4.6 seconds. He would strap himself into his blue racing harness and hurtle to France at four in the morning, blazing down the Ml, M25, M20 onto the cheap-off
er ferry. Off the other end, racing spoilers scraping the ramp. Rumbling into the car park of Mutantsave as they opened, turbos crackling and cooling, to fill up his boot with boxes and cartons and pallets of cheap things.
When he came, he came in a green Landrover van.
A few days before, I had dinner with the Sams. As I sat down in their ‘clean as a place where they make microchips’ living room Sam entered waving a bottle. ‘I thought we might have this with dinner, Hillary, what do you say?’
I studied the label.
‘Um … I don’t think so, Sam, you see it’s a bottle of shampoo.’
‘But it mentions berries,’ argued Sam, unable to face the fact that he’d wasted five francs.
‘To add lustre to our hair if it is dry or medium to dry.’
Eventually he turned up a box of mixed Australian wines bought at a place called Booze Bonkers, which was just outside Caen apparently.
‘Sam, would you by any chance be going to France before Wednesday?’ I asked.
His eyebrows went up, wrinkling his forehead and shiny bald pate at the prospect of an adventure. Sam’s big yellow farming machines that went about doing his work in the fields were connected to the house by global positioning satellite which he could access from anywhere in the world on his laptop, so he would always be able keep in touch with the damage he was doing, even on the RNl.
‘Well, I wasn’t planning to … but I don’t see why I couldn’t.’ Sam was always ready for a drive.
‘Please don’t if you weren’t . .
‘No, no a midnight drive is always agreeable and they say penicillin is much cheaper over there so I was plannin’ to get some. Is there summink you wanted me to get you then?’
‘Well, erm … um … just some cakes, patisserie if you could … I seem to be having a young man to tea on Thursday and it’s so hard to get any decent cakes round here.’