by Tom Sharpe
Contents
About the Author
Also by Tom Sharpe
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Copyright
About the Author
Tom Sharpe was born in 1928 and educated at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He did his national service in the Marines before going to South Africa in 1951, where he did social work before teaching in Natal. He had a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg from 1957 until 1961, and from 1963 to 1972 he was a lecturer in History at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.
He is the author of sixteen novels, including Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape which were serialised on television, and Wilt which was made into a film. In 1986 he was awarded the XXIIIème Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir Xavier Forneret and in 2010 he received the inaugural BBK La Risa de Bilbao Prize. Tom Sharpe died in 2013.
Also by Tom Sharpe
Riotous Assembly
Indecent Exposure
Porterhouse Blue
Blott on the Landscape
Wilt
The Great Pursuit
The Throwback
The Wilt Alternative
Ancestral Vices
Vintage Stuff
Grantchester Grind
The Midden
Wilt in Nowhere
The Gropes
The Wilt Inheritance
Wilt on High
Tom Sharpe
1
‘Days of wine and roses,’ said Wilt to himself. It was an inconsequential remark but sitting on the Finance and General Purposes Committee at the Tech needed some relief and for the fifth year running Dr Mayfield had risen to his feet and announced, ‘We must put the Fenland College of Arts and Technology on the map.’
‘I should have thought it was there already,’ said Dr Board, resorting as usual to the literal to preserve his sanity. ‘In fact to the best of my knowledge it’s been there since 1895 when –’
‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ interrupted Dr Mayfield. ‘The fact of the matter is that the College has reached the point of no return.’
‘From what?’ asked Dr Board.
Dr Mayfield turned to the Principal. ‘The point I am trying to make –’ he began, but Dr Board hadn’t finished. ‘Is apparently that we are either an aircraft halfway to its destination or a cartographical feature. Or possibly both.’
The Principal sighed and thought about early retirement. ‘Dr Board,’ he said, ‘we are here to discuss ways and means of maintaining our present course structure and staffing levels in the face of the Local Education Authority and Central Government pressure to reduce the College to an adjunct of the Department of Unemployment.’
Dr Board raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? I thought we were here to teach. Of course, I may be mistaken but when I first entered the profession, that’s what I was led to believe. Now I learn that we’re here to maintain course structures, whatever they may be, and staffing levels. In plain English, jobs for the boys.’
‘And girls,’ said the Head of Catering, who hadn’t been listening too carefully. Dr Board eyed her critically.
‘And doubtless one or two creatures of indeterminate gender,’ he murmured. ‘Now, if Dr Mayfield –’
‘Is allowed to continue,’ interrupted the Principal, ‘we may arrive at a decision by lunchtime.’
Dr Mayfield continued. Wilt stared out of the window at the new Electronics Building and wondered for the umpteenth time what it was about committees that turned educated and relatively intelligent men and women, all of them graduates of universities, into bitter and boring and argumentative people whose sole purpose seemed to be to hear themselves speak and prove everyone else wrong. And committees had come to dominate the Tech. In the old days, he had been able to come to work and spend his mornings and afternoons trying to teach or at least to awaken some intellectual curiosity in classes of Turners and Fitters or even Plasterers and Printers, and if they hadn’t learnt much from him, he had been able to go home in the evening with the knowledge that he had gained something from them.
Now everything was different. Even his title, Head of Liberal Studies, had been changed to that of Communication Skills and Expressive Attainment, and he spent his time on committees or drawing up memoranda and so-called consultative documents or reading similarly meaningless documents from other departments. It was the same throughout the Tech. The Head of Building, whose literacy had always been in some doubt, had been forced to justify classes in Bricklaying and Plastering in a 45-page discussion paper on ‘Modular Construction and Internal Surface Application’, a work of such monumental boredom and bad grammar, that Dr Board had suggested forwarding it to the RIBA with the recommendation that he be given a Fellowship in Architectural Semanticism – or alternatively Cementicism. There had been a similar row over the monograph submitted by the Head of Catering on ‘Dietetic Advances In Multi-Phased Institutional Provisioning’, to which Dr Mayfield had taken exception on the grounds that the emphasis on faggots and Queen’s Pudding might lead to a misunderstanding in certain quarters. Dr Cox, Head of Science, had demanded to know what a Multi-Phased Institution was, and what the hell was wrong with faggots, he’d been brought up on them. Dr Mayfield had explained he was referring to gays and the Head of Catering had confused the issue still further by denying she was a feminist. Wilt had sat through the controversy in silent wondering, as he did now, at the curious modern assumption that you could alter acts by using words in a different way. A cook was a cook no matter that you call him a Culinary Scientist. And calling a gasfitter a Gaseous and Liquefaction Engineer didn’t alter the fact that he had taken a course in Gasfitting.
He was just considering how long it would be before they called him an Educational Scientist or even a Mental Processing Officer, when he was drawn from this reverie by a question of ‘contact hours’.
‘If I could have a breakdown of departmental timetabling on a real-time contact hour basis,’ said Dr Mayfield, ‘we could computerize those areas of overlap which under present circumstances render our staffing levels unviable on a cost-effective analysis.’
There was a silence while the Heads of Departments tried to figure this out. Dr Board snorted and the Principal rose to the bait. ‘Well, Board?’ he asked.
‘Not particularly,’ said the Head of Modern Languages, ‘but thank you for enquiring all the same.’
‘You know very well what Dr Mayfield wants.’
‘Only on the basis of past experience and linguistic guesswork,’ said Dr Board. ‘What puzzles me in the present instance is his use of the phrase “real-time contact hours”. Now according to my vocabulary …’
‘Dr Board,’ said the Principal, wishing to God he could sack the man, ‘what we want to know is quite simply the number of contact hours the members of your department do per week.’
Dr Board made a show of consulting a small notebook. ‘None,’ he said finally.
‘None?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Are you trying to say your staff do no teaching at all? That’s a downright lie. If it isn’t …’
‘I didn’t say anythin
g about teaching and no one asked me to. Dr Mayfield quite specifically asked for “real time” –’
‘I don’t give a damn about real-time. He means actual.’
‘So do I,’ said Dr Board, ‘and if any of my lecturers have been touching their students even for a minute, let alone an hour, I’d –’
‘Board,’ snarled the Principal, ‘you’re trying my patience too far. Answer the question.’
‘I have. Contact means touching, and a contact hour must therefore mean a touching hour. Nothing more and nothing less. Consult any dictionary you choose, and you’ll find it derives directly from the Latin, contactus. The infinitive is contigere and the past participle contactum, and whichever way you look at it, it still means touch. It cannot mean to teach.’
‘Dear God,’ said the Principal, through clenched teeth, but Dr Board hadn’t finished.
‘Now I don’t know what Dr Mayfield encourages in Sociology and for all I know he may go in for touch teaching, or, what I believe is called in the vernacular “group groping”, but in my department …’
‘Shut up,’ shouted the Principal, now well beyond the end of his tether. ‘You will all submit in writing the number of teaching hours, the actual teaching hours, each member of your department does …’
As the meeting broke up, Dr Board walked down the corridor with Wilt. ‘It’s not often one can strike a blow for linguistic accuracy,’ he said, ‘but at least I’ve thrown a spanner in Mayfield’s clockwork mind. The man’s mad.’
*
It was a theme Wilt took up with Peter Braintree in the public bar of The Pig In A Poke half an hour later.
‘The whole system is loony,’ he said over a second pint, ‘Mayfield’s given up empire-building with degree courses and he’s on a cost-effectiveness kick now.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Braintree. ‘We’ve already lost half our textbook allocation this year, and Foster and Carston have been bullied into early retirement. At this rate I’ll end up teaching King Lear to a class of sixty with eight copies of the play to go round.’
‘At least you’re teaching something. You want to try Expressive Attainment with Motor Mechanics Three. Expressive Attainment! The sods know all there is to be known about cars in the first place, and I haven’t a clue what Expressive Attainment means. Talk about wasting the taxpayers’ money. And anyway, I spend more of my time on committees than I do supposedly teaching. That’s what galls me.’
‘How’s Eva?’ asked Braintree, recognizing Wilt’s mood and trying to change the subject.
‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Mind you, that’s not entirely true. At least she’s off Suffrage for Little Children and Votes at Eleven Plus. After those two blokes from PIE came round soliciting and went away with thick ears.’
‘Pie?’
‘Paedophile Information Exchange. Used to be called child molesters. These two sods made the mistake of trying to get Eva’s support for lowering the age of consent to four. I could have told them four was an unlucky number round our way, considering what the quads get up to. By the time Eva had finished with them, they must have thought 45 Oakhurst Avenue was part of some bloody zoo, and they’d broached the topic with a tigress in cub.’
‘Serve the swine right.’
‘Didn’t serve Mr Birkenshaw right though. Samantha promptly organized the other three into CAR, otherwise known as Children Against Rape, and set up a target in the garden. Luckily the neighbours put their communal feet down before one of the little boys in the street got himself castrated. The quads were just warming up with penknives. Well, actually, they were Sabatier knives from the kitchen, and they’d got quite good with them. Emmeline could hit the damned thing’s scrotum at eighteen feet, and Penelope punctured it at ten.’
‘It?’ said Braintree faintly.
‘Mind you, it was a bit oversize. They made it out of an old football bladder and two tennis balls. But it was the penis that got the neighbours up in arms. And Mr Birkenshaw. I didn’t know he had a foreskin like that. Come to think of it, I doubt if anyone else in the street did either. Not until Emmeline wrote his name on the damned French letter and fixed wrapping paper from the Christmas cake round the end and the wind carried it ten gardens at peak viewing time on Saturday afternoon. It ended up hanging from the cherry tree in Mrs Lorrimer’s on the corner. That way you could see BIRKENSHAW down all four streets quite clearly.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Braintree. ‘What on earth did Mr Birkenshaw have to say about it?’
‘Not much yet,’ said Wilt, ‘he’s still in shock. Spent most of Saturday night at the cop shop trying to convince them he isn’t the Phantom Flasher. They’ve been trying to catch that lunatic for years and this time they thought they’d got him.’
‘What? Birkenshaw? They’re out of their tinies, the man’s a Town Councillor.’
‘Was,’ said Wilt. ‘I doubt if he’ll stand again. Not after what Emmeline told the policewoman. Said she knew his prick looked like that because he’d lured her into his back garden and waggled the thing at her.’
‘Lured her?’ said Braintree dubiously. ‘With all due respect to your daughters, Henry, I wouldn’t have said they were exactly lurable. Ingenious, perhaps, and …’
‘Diabolical,’ said Wilt. ‘Don’t think I mind what you say about them. I have to live with the hell-cats. Of course she wasn’t lured. She’s had a vendetta with his little pussy for months because it comes and knocks the stuffing out of ours. She was probably trying to poison the brute. Anyway, she was in his garden and according to her he waggled it. Not his version of course. Claimed he always pees on the compost heap and if little girls choose to lurk … Anyway, that didn’t go down with the policewoman very well either. Said it was unhygienic.’
‘Where was Eva while this was going on?’
‘Oh, here and there,’ said Wilt airily. ‘Apart from practically accusing Mr Birkenshaw of being related to the Yorkshire Ripper … I managed to stop that one going down in the police report by saying she was hysterical. Talk about drawing fire. At least I had the policewoman there to protect me and as far as I know the law of slander doesn’t apply to ten-year-olds. If it does, we’ll have to emigrate. As it is, I’m having to work nights to keep them at that blasted school for so-called gifted children. The cost is astronomic.’
‘I thought Eva was getting something off by helping out there.’
‘Helped out is more accurate. In fact, ordered off the premises,’ said Wilt and asked for two more pints.
‘What on earth for? I’d have thought they’d have been only too glad to have someone as energetic as Eva as an unpaid ancillary cleaning up and doing the cooking.’
‘Not when the said ancillary takes it into her head to brighten up their micro-computers with metal polish. Anyway, she screwed the lot and it was a miracle we didn’t have to replace them. Mind you, I wouldn’t have minded handing over the ones we’ve got in the house. The place is a deathtrap of I triple E cables and floppy discs, and I can never get near the TV. And when I do, something called a dot matrix printer goes off somewhere and sounds like a hornets’ nest in a hurry. And all for what? So that four girls of average if fiendish intelligence can steal a march on snotty-nosed small boys in the scholastic rat-race.’
‘We’re just old-fashioned,’ said Braintree with a sigh. ‘The fact is the computer’s here to stay and children know how to use them and we don’t. Even the language.’
‘Don’t talk to me about that gobbledygook. I used to think a poke was a crude form of sex. Instead it’s something numerical in a programme and a programme’s not what it was. Nothing is. Even bugs and bytes. And to pay for this electronic extravaganza, I spend Tuesday night at the prison teaching a bloody gangster what I don’t know about E. M. Forster and Fridays at Baconheath Airbase giving lectures on British Culture and Institutions to a load of Yanks with time on their hands till Armageddon.’
‘I shouldn’t let the news of that leak out to Mavis Mottram,’ said
Braintree as they finished their beer and left the pub. ‘She’s taken up Banning the Bomb with a vengeance. She’s been on to Betty about it and I’m surprised she hasn’t roped Eva in.’
‘She tried but it didn’t work, for a change. Eva’s too busy worrying about the quads to get involved in demonstrations.’
‘All the same, I’d keep quiet about the airbase job. You don’t want Mavis picketing your house.’
But Wilt wasn’t sure. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It might make us slightly more popular with the neighbours. At the moment they’ve got it into their thick heads that I’m either a potential mass-murderer or a left-wing revolutionary because I teach at the Tech. Being picketed by Mavis on the wholly false grounds that I’m in favour of the Bomb might improve my image.’ They walked back to the Tech by way of the cemetery.
*
At 45 Oakhurst Avenue, it was one of Eva Wilt’s better days. There were days, better days and one of those days. Days were just days when nothing went wrong and she drove the quads to school without too much quarrelling, and came home to do the housework and went shopping and had a tuna-fish salad for lunch and did some mending afterwards and planted something in the garden and picked the children up from school and nothing particularly nasty happened. On one of those days everything went wrong. The quads quarrelled before, during and after breakfast, Henry lost his temper with them and she found herself having to defend them when she knew all the time he was right, the toast got stuck in the toaster and she was late getting the girls to school and something went wrong with the Hoover or the loo wouldn’t flush and nothing seemed to be right with the world, so that she was tempted to have a glass of sherry before lunch and that was no good because then she’d want a nap afterwards and the rest of the day would be spent trying to catch up with what she had to do. But on one of her better days she did all the things she did on days and was somehow uplifted by the thought that the quads were doing wonderfully well at The School for The Mentally Gifted and would definitely get scholarships and go on to become doctors or scientists or something really creative, and that it was lovely to be alive in an age when all this was possible and not like it had been when she was a girl and had to do what she was told. It was on such days that she even considered having her mother to live with them instead of being in the old people’s home in Luton and wasting all that money. Only considered it, of course, because Henry couldn’t stand the old lady and had threatened to walk out and find himself digs if she ever stayed more than three days in the house.