by Tom Sharpe
Wilt left them still arguing and took himself off to the spare bedroom which he used as his study and looked at an Ordnance Survey map of the West Country and the route he would follow on his tour. Brampton Abbotts, Kings Caple, Hoarwithy, Little Birch and up to Holme Lacy by way of Dewchurch. And beyond that over the Dinedor Hills to Hereford and the great cathedral there with the Mappa Mundi – the map of the known world when the world was young – and then on again following the River Wye through Sugwas Pool, Bridge Sollers, Mansell Gamage to Moccas and Bredwardine and finally to Hay-on-Wye and the little town of bookshops. He thought he would stay there for two or three days depending on the weather and the books he bought. After that he would head north again by way of Upper Hergest and Lower, which seemed to be above it in the map. It was an old map with a cloth back to it and it was difficult to read the names where it had been folded. It didn’t show the motorways or anything built after the War but that too suited him perfectly. He didn’t want the new England, he wanted old England and with names like those on the map he was bound to find it. By the time he went to bed the dispute downstairs had burnt itself out. Eva had given way on the gingham dresses and the quads had agreed not to go in their oldest and most patched jeans. Bower boots were out too.
5
For the next fortnight Wilt kept out of the house as much as possible and occupied himself with finishing next year’s timetable while Eva bustled about trying to think of essential things she might have forgotten to tell Henry to do while she was away.
‘Now don’t forget to give Tibby her dried food at night. She has her main tin of Cattomeat in the morning. Oh, and there’s her vitamin supplement. You crush that up in a saucer and put some cream from the top of the milk on it and stir …’
‘Yes,’ said Wilt, who had no intention of feeding the cat. Tibby was going into the cattery on Roltay Road as soon as Eva and the girls were on their way to Wilma.
He solved another problem too.
He would take cash and use his Building Society savings. They had always been reserved for personal emergencies and he’d never told Eva of their existence.
He made another decision. He wasn’t going to take a map. Wilt wanted to see things with a fresh eye and make his own discoveries. He would go wherever the countryside took his fancy without any idea where he was and without consulting any map. He would simply go over to the West and catch the first bus he could find and get out when he saw something that interested him. Chance would determine his holiday.
6
A week later, having driven Eva and the girls to Heathrow and seen them disappear through the Departures Gate, Wilt came back to Oakhurst Avenue and took Tibby to the Bideawhile cats’ home in Oldsham secure in the knowledge that since he had paid cash and hadn’t used the usual cattery Eva always went to she was unlikely to find out. Having dealt with that problem Wilt had supper and went to bed. Next morning he was up early and out of the house by seven. He walked down to the railway station to catch a train to Birmingham. From there he would travel by bus. His escape from Ipford and the Tech had begun. That evening would find him comfortably installed in a pub with a log fire and with a good meal inside him and a pint of beer or better still real ale in front of him.
Eva wasn’t having quite the wonderful time she had expected. The flight had been delayed for over an hour. The plane had reached the end of the runway at Heathrow and was preparing for take-off when the Captain announced that a passenger in first class had been taken ill and was too sick to make the journey, and they were therefore having to return to the terminal to have him carried off. As a result they lost their turn in the take-offline and worse still, because they weren’t allowed to fly with the baggage of an absent passenger, his bags had to be found and removed too. Finding the sick man’s luggage meant taking all the bags out of the hold and sorting through them one by one. By that time they were well behind schedule and Eva, who had never flown in such a big plane before, was beginning to become genuinely alarmed. Of course she couldn’t show it in front of the girls who were thoroughly enjoying themselves pressing buttons so that the seats tilted backwards and trying on the earphones and letting down the tables from the seat in front and generally occupying themselves to the discomfort of other passengers.
Then Penelope had insisted in a loud voice that she had to go to the loo and Eva had had to squeeze past the man at the end of the row to go with her. When they got back and Eva had squeezed back to her seat, Josephine said she had to go too. Eva took her and Emmeline and Samantha just to be on the safe side. By this time – and they had taken their time trying out various buttons and the toilet water – Eva needed to go herself and just at that moment it was announced that passengers had to return to their seats for take-off. Eva once more made the difficult passage past the man at the end of the row who said something in a foreign language which she didn’t understand but which she suspected wasn’t very nice. Then when they had reached cruising height and she could go again and in something of a hurry too, what he had to say didn’t require any knowledge of a foreign language to tell her that it wasn’t nice at all. Eva got her own back by treading on his foot when she resumed her seat. This time there could be no mistaking his feelings. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Mind where you’re treading, lady. I ain’t no doormat.’
Eva pressed the button for the stewardess and reported the matter.
‘This man – I won’t call him a gentleman – said …’ She paused and remembered the quads. ‘Well, he used a rude word.’
‘He said “Fuck”,’ Josephine explained.
‘He said “Fuck you”,’ Penelope added.
The stewardess looked from Eva to the girls and knew it was going to be a bad trip.
‘Yes, well, some men do,’ she said pacifically.
‘No, they don’t,’ said Samantha. ‘Not impotent ones. They can’t.’
‘Shut your mouth,’ Eva snapped and tried to smile apologetically at the stewardess who wasn’t smiling at all.
‘It’s true,’ Emmeline joined in from across the aisle. ‘They can’t get erections.’
‘Emmeline, if I hear another word out of you,’ Eva bawled. ‘I’ll …’ She was getting to her feet when the man beside her got there first.
‘Listen, lady, I don’t give a goddam fuck what she said. You ain’t corn-crushing my feet again.’
Eva looked triumphantly at the stewardess.
‘There you are, what did I tell you?’
But the man was also appealing to the stewardess.
‘You got another seat? I’m not spending seven hours sitting next to this hippopotamus, I’m telling you I’m not.’
It was a thoroughly unpleasant scene and when it had been cooled down and the man had been found another seat as far away from Eva and the quads as possible, the stewardess went back to the galley.
‘Row 31 is trouble. Keep your eyes open. Four girls and a mother who is built like a power lifter. Sperm bank her with Tyson and there’s no one would go a single round with the baby.’
The steward looked down the rows.
‘Thirty-one is suspect,’ he said.
‘Don’t I know it.’
But the steward was looking at the man in the window seat. So were two men in grey suits five seats behind him.
That was the beginning of the flight. It didn’t get much better. Samantha spilt her Coke, all of it, on the trousers of the man by the window, who said, ‘Forget it, these things happen,’ though he didn’t say it very nicely and then went off to the toilet. On the way there he noticed something that caused him to spend a far longer time locked inside than was needed for cleaning his trousers or even relieving himself. Still in the end he came out looking fairly calm and went back to his seat. But before sitting down he opened the hand-luggage compartment above and found a book. It took him some moments to get it out but in the end he succeeded and to avoid having a Coca-Cola spilt on his trousers again he offered to sit in the aisle seat.
‘The little l
ady can have the window,’ he said with a sweet smile. ‘I got more room for my legs here.’
Eva said that was real kind of him. (She was beginning to adjust her language to American and ‘real’ was just as good as ‘really’.) She was also beginning to distinguish between nice Americans who didn’t complain when one of the quads spilt things on them and were polite and called them little ladies, and the other sort who said ‘Fuck’ and called her a hippopotamus just because she stepped on their toes. After that the flight continued pretty harmoniously. There was a movie which kept the girls interested and Eva concentrated on what she was going to say to Uncle Wally and Auntie Joan about how kind it had been of them to invite them over and pay for the tickets especially as there was no way she could have come the quads’ education cost so much and clothing them etc. In fact she dozed for a while and it was only when the stewardesses came round with the trolley again and they had something more to eat that she woke up and took particular care to see that there was no more spilling on people’s trousers.
In fact she got talking with the nice man in the aisle seat who asked if this was her first trip to the USA and where she was going, and who was real interested to learn everything about her and the girls and even went so far as to write their names down and said if they ever came down Florida way this was his address. Eva really liked him; he was so charming. And she told him all about how Wally Immelmann was head of Immelmann Enterprises in Wilma, Tennessee, and had a lakeside house up in the Smokies and how her Auntie Joan had married him when he was at the airbase and an Air Force pilot flying out of Lakenheath, and the man said he was Sol Campito and he worked with a Miami-based finance corporation and sure he’d heard of Immelmann Enterprises, like everyone had it was so important. An hour later he took another ‘hygiene break’ which was a new term for Eva and meant going to the toilet again. This time he didn’t take so long and when he came back he put his book away in the luggage compartment and said he was going to get some shut-eye because he had to catch the shuttle flight down to Miami and it was a long trip from where he’d come, like Munich, Germany, where he’d had some business. And so the flight wore on and nothing untoward occurred except that Penelope kept asking when they were going to get to Atlanta because she was bored and Sammy wouldn’t let her have the window seat so she could look out at the clouds. Behind them the two men in grey suits watched the man who had given up his window seat for Samantha. One of them took himself off to the toilet and was in there for five minutes. He was followed half an hour later by the second suit who stayed even longer. When he came back he shrugged as he sat down. Finally by the time Eva was getting really tired the Jumbo was slowly dropping down towards the land and the countryside seemed to be coming up to them and the undercarriage was locked down and the flaps were up and they were down with only a slight thump and lurch and into reverse thrust.
‘The land of the free,’ said the man with a smile when they were at the terminal and could collect their bags from the overhead lockers; he was on his feet helping to get Eva’s and the quads’ stuff for them. And then he very politely stood in the aisle in the way of the other passengers to let them file out first. In fact he let a number of other passengers go in front of him and only then moved himself. By the time they had collected their hold luggage from the carousel he was nowhere to be seen. He sat in the toilet writing the address and the names Eva had given him before he came out. Twenty minutes later Eva and the quads passed through Immigration and Customs where they were held up for some time and a German Shepherd took an interest in Emmeline’s hand luggage. Two men studied the family for two minutes and then they were through and there was Uncle Wally and Auntie Joan and there was all the hugging and kissing imaginable. It was wonderful.
It wasn’t quite so wonderful in a little room back in Customs for the man who’d called himself Sol Campito. The things from his travel bags were spread out on the floor and he was standing naked in another booth with a man with plastic gloves on his hand telling him to get his legs open.
‘Wasting time,’ said one of the men in the room. ‘Give him the castor oil and blow the fucking condoms out quicker, eh Joe? You crazy enough to have swallowed the stuff?’
‘Shit,’ said Campito. ‘I don’t do no drugs. You got the wrong guy.’
Four men in an office next door watched him through a darkened observation window.
‘So he’s clean. Met the contact in Munich and left with the stuff. Now he’s clean. Then it’s got to be the fat Brit with the kids. How did you assess her?’
‘Dumb. Dumb as hell.’
‘Nervous?’
‘Not at all. Excited yes but nervous no way.’
The second man nodded.
‘To Wilma, Tennessee.’
‘And we know where she’s going. So we keep her under observation. The tightest possible. OK?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Just make sure you keep under cover. The stuff that bastard’s said to have picked up from Poland is lethal. The good thing is we know from his notebook where that Wilt woman is heading with that foursome. Get there fast. This surveillance has top priority. I want to know all there is to know about this Immelmann guy.’
7
Wilt’s day had begun badly and got steadily worse. All his hopes and expectations of the previous evening had proved terribly wrong. Instead of the homely pub with a log fire, and a good meal and several pints of beer or better still real ale inside him, and a warm bed waiting for him, he found himself trudging along a country lane with dark clouds closing in from the West. In many respects it had been a disastrous day. He had walked the mile and a half to the station with his knapsack on his back only to find that there were no trains to Birmingham because of work on the line. Wilt had had to take a bus. It was a comfortable enough bus – or would have been if it hadn’t been half filled with hyperactive schoolchildren under the charge of a teacher who did his level best to ignore them. The rest of the passengers were Senior, and in Wilt’s opinion Senile, Citizens, out on a day-trip to enjoy themselves, a process that seemed to consist of complaining loudly about the behaviour of the hyperactive kids and insisting on stopping at every service station on the motorway to relieve themselves. In between service stations they sang songs Wilt had seldom heard before and never wanted to hear again. And when finally they reached Birmingham and he bought a ticket for Hereford he had difficulty finding the bus. In the end he did. It was a very old double-decker bus with a faded ‘Hereford’ sign on the front. Wilt thanked God there were no other passengers in it. He’d had enough of small boys with sticky fingers climbing across his lap to look out the window and of old age pensioners singing, or at any rate caterwauling, ‘Ganging along the Scotswood Road to see the Blaydon Races’ and ‘We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’. Wilt climbed wearily into the back and lay down across the seat and fell asleep. When the bus left he woke up and was surprised to find he was still the only passenger. He went back to sleep again. He had only had two sandwiches and a bottle of beer all day and he was hungry. Still, when the bus got to Hereford he’d find a café and have a good meal and look for a bed and breakfast and in the morning set out on his walking tour. The bus didn’t get to Hereford. Instead it stopped outside a shabby bungalow on what was clearly a distinctly Broad and the driver got out. Wilt waited ten minutes for him to return and then got out himself and was about to knock on the door when it opened and a large angry man looked out.
‘What do you want?’ he demanded. In the bungalow a Staffordshire bull terrier growled menacingly.
‘Well, as a matter of fact I want to go to Hereford,’ said Wilt, keeping a wary eye on the dog.
‘So what are you doing here? This isn’t bloody Hereford.’
Wilt produced his ticket.
‘I paid my fare for Hereford in Birmingham and that bus—’
‘Isn’t going nowhere near Hereford. It’s going to the fucking knacker’s yard if I can’t flog the fucker first.’
‘My, oh, my,’ said the man sarcastically. ‘You could have fooled me. You sure it don’t say “New York”? Go and take a dekko and don’t come back and tell me. Just bugger off. You come back and I’ll set the dog on you.’
He went back into the bungalow and slammed the door. Wilt retreated and looked at the sign on the bus. It was blank. Wilt stared up and down the road and decided to go to the left. It was then he noticed the scrapyard behind the house. It was full of old rusting cars and lorries. Wilt walked on. There was bound to be a village somewhere down the road and where there was a village there was bound to be a pub. And beer. But after an hour in which he passed nothing more accommodating than another awful bungalow with a ‘For Sale’ sign outside it, he took his knapsack off and sat down on the grass verge opposite and considered his situation. The bungalow with its boarded windows and overgrown garden wasn’t a pleasing prospect. Lugging his knapsack Wilt moved a couple of hundred yards down the lane and sat down again and wished he’d bought some more sandwiches. But the evening sun shone down and the sky to the east was clear so things weren’t all that bad. In fact in many ways this was exactly what he had set out to experience. He had no idea where he was and no wish to know. Right from the start he had intended to erase the map of England he carried in his head. Not that he ever could; he had memorised it since his first geography lessons and over the years that internal map had been enlarged as much by his reading as by the places he’d visited. Hardy was Dorset or Wessex, and Bovington was Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native as well as where Lawrence of Arabia had been killed on his motorcycle; Bleak House was Lincolnshire; Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns were the Potteries in Staffordshire; even Sir Walter Scott had contributed to Wilt’s literary cartography with Woodstock and Ivanhoe. Graham Greene too. Wilt’s Brighton had been defined for ever by Pinkie and the woman waiting on the pier. But if he couldn’t erase that map he could at any rate do his best to ignore it by not having a clue where he was, by avoiding large towns and even by disregarding place names that might prevent him from finding the England he was looking for. It was a romantic, nostalgic England. He knew that but he was indulging his romantic streak. He wanted to look at old houses, at rivers and streams, at old trees and ancient woods. The houses could be small, mere cottages or large houses standing in parkland, once great mansions but now in all probability divided up into apartments or turned into nursing homes or schools. None of that mattered to Wilt. He just wanted to wash Oakhurst Avenue, the Tech and the meaninglessness of his own routine out of his system and see England with new eyes, eyes unsullied by the experience of so many years as a teacher.