“Nobody has ever done it before,” enthused the girl, who wore striped socks and whose name was Sue.
“It’s an absolute breakthrough,” affirmed the long young man, who had a beard at one end and stained suede shoes at the other and whose name was Jeremy.
They stayed for a long time drinking coffee and outlining Borderland Television’s schemes. (These included cash payments for all the Bagthorpes, which was fortunate because it made it easier for them to appear happy for the time being.)
Sue then produced xeroxed copies of Tess’s winning entry, and handed them round.
“These are a Press Release,” she told them, and Tess preened herself.
“A Tess Release,” she murmured.
No one laughed.
Jeremy then took a lot of photographs with a Polaroid and the pair finally drove off with much waving and calls of “Au revoir!”
“Well, isn’t it all thrilling?” exclaimed Mrs Bagthorpe, turning back into the house. “You really are clever, Tess, dear. And won’t it be fun?”
“It will drive us all,” predicted Mr Bagthorpe, “to the brink of breakdown. If we have to look happy for more than five minutes on end, the strain will prove too much.”
“Nonsense, dear,” said his wife. “All we have to do is to be our own natural selves.”
As it happened, she was more or less right about this. Tess’s entry about her Happy Family was a masterpiece of subtlety. She had foreseen difficulties should she actually win, and had therefore cleverly admitted, for instance, such things as her father’s shouting and William’s sarcasm, and turned them round so as to make them appear expressions of extreme happiness and affection. Jack took his own copy of the entry up to his room and read it aloud to Zero in the hope that the spirit of the thing would get through to him.
“My family,” he read, “is the happiest in England if not the whole world. And practically every member of the family is a genius, which makes their happiness all the more remarkable. Take my father. He is a creative writer, and also the most lovable eccentric in the world.” (Mr Bagthorpe took Tess up sharply on this, later. “I am not lovable,” he declared. “I have never been lovable.”)
As Jack read on, he could see why Tess had won the Competition. She really had made the Bagthorpes sound happy. She had even brought in the Parkers and made them sound happy as well. She described Grandma’s cataclysmic Birthday Party as the kind of lighthearted, careless junketing that was the very stuff of life as lived by the Bagthorpes.
Jack was impressed. He thought it weird that Tess should write the truth in such a way that it came nowhere near the actual truth. He was pleased to see that Tess had included Zero, and said how much happiness he gave to the whole family, and what hilarity Mr Bagthorpe created by insisting that he did not like him.
“D’you hear that, Zero?” Jack said. “Father likes you. He really does. And Tess says – now listen to what she says about you: ‘At the very centre of this happy family is their pet dog, and because he is all in all to them, they have called him, with true Bagthorpian upside-down humour – Zero.’ Hear that, Zero? That’s you. Good old boy!”
Zero took the reading calmly. Mr Bagthorpe’s opinion did not seem to matter to him any more. He had, though Jack could not know this at the time, inklings of what was to come.
Chapter Eleven
Mrs Fosdyke was frankly disbelieving when told about the Bagthorpes’ overnight promotion to The Happiest Family in England.
“I never heard such nonsense,” she said briskly to Jack, who was first down. “Happy indeed! Whatever next!”
“And we’re all going to be on telly on Christmas Day,” he went on. “Including Zero.”
“The programmes at Christmas is always rubbish,” declared Mrs Fosdyke deflatingly. “They’re never in this world going to make a film in this house, the state it’s in?”
“They are,” Jack nodded. “They said they wanted us exactly as we are. They thought the Fire and Flood sounded really interesting and happy.”
Mrs Fosdyke snorted.
“P’raps they’d like to come to tea one day,” she said, “and have a dish of oxtail trifle, and see how happy that makes ’em. Whose turn is it today? Not that it makes any difference.”
She was consulting the Tin-Shaking Rota on the pantry door.
“Mr Bagthorpe Senior. Ah well,” she drew a deep sigh. “No better and no worse than anyone, he ain’t, and at least a gentleman with it. You don’t get him hooting at baked beans for a fruit salad. Apologise, he does, every time, ever so handsome.”
“Grandpa is polite,” agreed Jack.
“Where’s them workmen got to?” enquired Mrs Fosdyke. “Here by now, they ought to be. Are they coming or not? We shall never get this place straight.”
Jack told her about the row and about the workmen’s decision. Mrs Fosdyke was not surprised, and said so.
“More than ordinary flesh and blood’s used to, the goings-on in this house. There’ll be workmen giving their notices every five minutes. Bound to be.”
She was wrong about this. Later workmen, not having had the benefit of hearing Mr Bagthorpe’s diatribe about bills, tended to stay on, despite all setbacks, out of sheer curiosity. They wanted to see what happened next.
Quite apart from the daily rituals of Tin Shaking, and the average once-a-day furore, a lot of extra things began to happen to the Bagthorpes during the ensuing weeks.
The Competition Entering began to pay off, sometimes in surprising and even unwelcome ways.
Mr Bagthorpe’s first win, for instance, entitled him to a free stay at Tallbuoys Health Farm. He won this by accident. It was, as his wife pointed out, his own fault for not reading the small print. The Competition had been run by the makers of a well-known fresh-orange drink, and what Mr Bagthorpe had really been after was a fortnight at a first-class hotel on the island where the oranges were grown. He was disgusted by his runner’s-up prize and the letter that came with it, which ended up by wishing him a “happy, healthy future with BETTA ORANGE JUICE”.
“I have read about Health Farms,” he said, “and have no intention of entering one. I should return an attenuated wreck addicted to soya beans and raw yeast.”
“Oh, really, Henry,” protested his wife, “they are the most splendid places. You would return lithe and fit for Christmas, and have rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous.”
“I have no wish to rub shoulders with the rich and famous,” he replied, “particularly in a Turkish bath. Like who, for instance?”
Mrs Bagthorpe reeled off a list of well-known politicians, TV personalities and film actresses who were all known to be regular patrons of Health Farms.
“It would, of course, be useful material for future scripts,” he mused, the names of two of his own favourite film actresses having figured in Mrs Bagthorpe’s list.
“Of course it would,” she agreed. “Why not write and say that you will go the week after next, the last week in November? It will be so quiet there and it must be very hard for you to write with the house so full of workmen.”
“I am used, of course,” he said, “to writing under conditions that would have stopped even Charles Dickens in his tracks.”
“I know, dear, and we’re terribly proud of you,” replied his wife. “But think what you might achieve during a period of total peace.”
“I cannot for the moment imagine what total peace is like,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “But I think you are right. I must go, for everybody’s sake.”
And so, to the amazement and ill-concealed delight of the rest of the family, he wrote off accepting his prize and fixing a date a week hence for his stay. Once having decided to go, he was impervious to all quips and warnings from his unsympathetic family.
“Crikey, Father, you’ve got a nerve,” William told him. “They won’t give you any food, you know. You’ll come back half the man you are.”
“Or develop anorexia nervosa,” added Tess, “which can be fatal, though admitte
dly more likely to be so in the case of an adolescent female, which you are not.”
“Debbie Beaumont’s mother went to one of those,” chipped in Rosie. “And Debbie says her eyes sunk all in.”
Grandma contented herself with being lofty. She was going to miss her son. He instigated a good seventy-five per cent of all Bagthorpian rows, and she needed someone to pit herself against.
“While not disputing that you have plenty of poisons in your system which require draining,” she said, “I am disappointed, Henry, that you do not have the necessary willpower and Strength of Character to drain yourself. The Health Farm is the most expensive form of starvation known to man. You should stay at home and drain your own poisons, and send the hundreds of pounds saved to Oxfam.”
Mr Bagthorpe pointed out that the money involved was to be spent by BETTA ORANGE JUICE, not himself, and that he did not believe that Oxfam would be a cause that they would wish publicly to espouse.
“Let them send a thousand gallons of the Orange Juice to Oxfam, then,” replied Grandma, uncrushed. “They could remove the labels, as you yourself did, Henry. Nobody can count on orange juice in this house any more.”
Mr Bagthorpe was adamant. He would go, he said, unless prevented by an Act of God (in the absence of Daisy). He would later regret this.
Other prizes began to arrive during the following week. Most of them were minor ones. There was, for instance, a spate of hairdryers at the beginning of the week, followed by a lot of leather diaries and three yoghurt-makers.
On Wednesday, however, Grandma and Daisy scored again, this time as purported regular users of a certain brand of toothpaste. This realised Mr Bagthorpe’s own worst fears, particularly as the letter was promptly followed up by two men from GENERATION GAP FLUORIDE TOOTHPASTE. One was the PR man and the other a photographer. They wished to use photographs of Grandma and Daisy in their advertisements, and were going to be very disenchanted, as Mr Bagthorpe observed, when the BLUE LAGOON LANOLIN-ENRICHED Toilet Soap people launched their new campaign.
“Somebody,” he said ominously, “will probably sue somebody. Especially as you, Mother, are wearing exactly the same dress and earrings as you wore for the BLUE LAGOON photographs.”
Mr Bagthorpe was in a particularly bad mood that day after having failed to win a motorised caravan and ended up instead with a car toolkit.
“It will be as much use to me,” he said, “as a pair of knitting needles to a penguin. A man of my temperament doesn’t look under bonnets. All machines are infernal. Machines are the opium of the masses. If all the machines in England were thrown into the North Sea tomorrow, we should be back in the garden of Eden. And the weather would probably improve.”
When William pointed out that it had been an illogical step for a man like Mr Bagthorpe to take on entering a Competition for any infernal machine, in the first place, he was ignored.
“I shall give that toolkit to Russell for Christmas,” Mr Bagthorpe said, cheering up a little at the thought. “I’m running out of ideas for useless things to give him. He drives around the countryside doing ten miles to the gallon and maiming people left and right, and has never seen a carburettor, whatever that is, in his life. Let him get under his bonnet.”
He thus fulminated as Mrs Bagthorpe telephoned The Knoll to inform the Parkers of Daisy’s latest triumph.
“She will be over in an hour,” she announced on her return. “Celia wants time to tidy her up a little.”
“I should think so,” returned her husband. “Are the child’s teeth all her own?”
This was a gibe aimed at Grandma, who had naturally cheated in this Competition, this time to the extent of claiming all her teeth as her own. This was not true, as the whole family knew. Sometimes, in the kind of tense, drawn-out silence that cropped up so often in the household, Grandma would click her dentures around in her mouth to intensify things further.
“You told a deliberate falsehood,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “False being the operative word.”
“Any woman would have done the same,” returned Grandma calmly. “It is our privilege. No one, I hope, will have the face to ask me to open wide?”
When Daisy arrived it was easy to see why Aunt Celia had required a whole hour for her adornment. Daisy had been got up, as Mr Bagthorpe observed, like a cross between Little Bo Peep and Goldilocks – the latter being an allusion to her hair, which had been prinked into tight ringlets and tied with two outstanding pink bows.
“Doesn’t she look a lamb?” cried Grandma ecstatically.
“A wolf,” contradicted Mr Bagthorpe, “in lamb’s clothing.”
When the men from GENERATION GAP FLUORIDE TOOTHPASTE arrived they were given coffee. As they drank it Mr Bagthorpe tried to bait them.
“In my opinion,” he told them, “and I am a Man of Letters, the word ‘gap’ in the name of your product would seem an unfortunate choice. I should not have thought that any manufacturer of toothpaste would have wanted the word ‘gap’ in his advertisements.”
The two men exchanged uneasy glances which Mr Bagthorpe did not fail to note. He had made, he realised, a scoring point.
“No doubt,” he continued, “the ill-considered use of this word has led to plummeting sales, and the drastic and desperate measure of trying to build up sales by the use of photographs of members of my family. Personally, I do not believe they will do anything for your sales.”
“Oh yes, sir, I’m sure they will,” said the PR man, with a gallant half-bow in the direction of Grandma, who was frigidly fixing her son. In the stony silence that followed Jack hoped fervently that she would not forget herself, and click her teeth.
The photographer had done nothing since he arrived but stare at Aunt Celia, who was looking particularly ravishing in full-length cheesecloth. In the end she must have become fidgety about this, and she left the room. At once the photographer began a whispered conversation with the PR man, who kept nodding his head. At last he looked at the Bagthorpes, who were already looking at him with undisguised interest, and said:
“Tim Scott Johnson, here, has had what I think is a perfectly valid and effective idea, and one we should perhaps adopt. In the original Competition, as you will remember, we asked only for entrants from two generations. If we were to have three, however, how much more effective our campaign would be.”
He again made a nervous bowing movement in the direction of a drawn-up Grandma.
“Would your daughter, perhaps, consent to taking part? On payment, of course, of a suitable fee.”
“Unfortunately,” replied Grandma, without batting an eyelid, “dear Celia has lost half her teeth.”
Mrs Bagthorpe let out a little gasp at this slander and Grandpa, fortunately for his wife, did not hear it. Like most men, he tended to stick up for Aunt Celia.
“But they look natural enough,” insisted the photographer, clearly bent on having Aunt Celia in his lens.
“I should imagine,” Grandma turned to the PR man, “that a certain moral issue is at stake here. Would you, may I ask, be happy to advertise your toothpaste with a smile that is, to your certain knowledge, false?”
She had him there. The session was completed without the presence of Aunt Celia, and Grandma smiled obligingly throughout, happy in the certainty that she ran no risk of being eclipsed by her own daughter.
“Besides,” she told the others later, by way of justification, “they would certainly have made me look ten years older than I really am, if Celia had been there, to emphasise the gap. Any woman would have done the same.”
To which there was no answer – or none, at any rate, that Mr Bagthorpe could think of off the cuff.
The Toothpaste people must have been very pleased with the results of the photographic session, because they returned next day with a request that Grandma and Daisy should, for an extra fee of course, make a television commercial. This was not as flattering as it first appeared, because it transpired that the sole object was to get Aunt Celia’s peerless features on to t
he screen and associated (one way or another) with GENERATION GAP FLUORIDE TOOTHPASTE.
“If Mrs Parker,” pleaded the PR man, “could possibly bring herself to appear, and say how much she regretted not having used GENERATION GAP and saved her teeth, it would be of immeasurable benefit.”
“I daresay,” replied Grandma, unmoved. “But my daughter, naturally, has her pride. She is a presentable-looking young woman, and would not wish the world at large to know her secret. Daisy and I will make the commercial unaided.”
This, inevitably, was what happened. The PR man evidently considered the matter of Aunt Celia’s false teeth too delicate a matter to broach to her personally, which was lucky for Grandma. The Bagthorpes all assembled to watch the making of the commercial, a project that involved an unconscionable number of people, from continuity girls to top-rank lighting cameramen.
“One would imagine,” remarked Mr Bagthorpe jealously, “that one of my scripts was involved. Is nobody interested in my teeth?”
These were sufficiently bared during the process of filming to have attracted the attention of anyone who had been interested in them. The dialogue struck Mr Bagthorpe as particularly nauseating, and he offered to rewrite it.
“If I were to rewrite it,” he told the producer, “and you gave me a credit, you would be reviewed in the Sundays. Everything I have ever written has been reviewed in the Sundays.”
The producer murmured feebly about Unions and Advertising Standards and apologetically ran Daisy and Grandma through their existing lines. These were footling to a degree, but the actresses involved clearly enjoyed saying them. One of the things Daisy had to say was, “Oh, Grandma, what lovely teeth you’ve got!” which, as Mr Bagthorpe pointed out, sounded like something straight out of Red Riding Hood, and would arouse disappointed expectations in the viewer of Grandma’s being metamorphosed into a wolf.
“She’d do that all right,” he told them.
The commercial took several hours to make, mainly because Daisy kept saying “Grandma Bag” and the Toothpaste people did not want the “Bag” in. Nor did the presence of Aunt Celia help. In the first place she distracted the film crew, and in the second she kept cooing and darting to adjust Daisy’s ringlets after the clapperboard and “Action!”
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