A Slip of the Keyboard (23 page)

They’ve learned to walk upright and now they’re ready for the big stuff—fire, cookery, music, arts, and the remarkable discovery that you shouldn’t mate with your sister. Because it’s too easy, says Father, the visionary horde leader. In order to progress, humanity must create inhibitions, frustrations, and complexes, and drive itself out of an animal Eden. To rise, we must screw ourselves up. Wonderful stuff, and my annual read. It’s about time it had a mass-market publisher again.

Finally, you won’t find this one in a modern bookshop but most good secondhand bookshops have it (unless I’ve been past, because I buy them up and press them on friends). It’s
The Specialist
, by Charles Sale, and is only a few dozen pages long. Strictly speaking, it’s the reminiscences of a privy builder, but it’s really a gentle education in the nature of humour. That stuff needs deep soil; you can grow wit on a damp flannel.

Corgi, 1989

You hold in your hands one of the funniest books of the last 500,000 years.
*
¹

At its simplest, it is a comic account of the discovery and use, by a family of extremely Early Men, of some of the most powerful and fearful things the human race has ever laid a hand on—fire, the spear, marriage, and so on. It’s also a reminder that the problems of progress didn’t start with the atomic age but with the need to cook without being cooked, and eat without being eaten.

It’s also a reminder that the
first
weapon to kill people but leave buildings standing was a club.

It hasn’t been a bestseller yet (at least in the commonly accepted sense of the word), and perhaps that is because it is so difficult to
categorize—nothing hurts a book more than people not knowing what shelf to put it on. Since it was first published in 1960, it has gone through a variety of printings and a variety of names (not just
The Evolution Man
, which is what Brian Aldiss wisely rechristened it that year when he chose it as one of the first novels to start the Penguin SF list, but also
Once Upon an Ice Age
and
What We Did to Father
).

Aldiss spotted what had not, until then, been noticed by anyone else, including the author—that it was, in fact, extremely good science fiction. The genuine article. Of course it didn’t have rockets in it. So what? You don’t need rockets. We all know this now. In 1960, that perception was less general.

I bought my copy then because it had “SF” on the cover. I’d buy
anything
that had “SF” on the cover in those dark days, in the same way that you’ll drink anything marked “liquid” if you’re in a desert. And then I realized that I was reading something literate, novel, and very, very funny. After twenty-eight years that original copy has been loaned to friends so often that the print has nearly been worn off the pages by eyeball pressure.

If you’ve read this far, it’s probably safe to tell you that this is a cult book. But don’t worry about it. The term simply means that people have stumbled upon it not because of massive advertising but by happy accident, and then cherished the wonderful warm feeling that they’re the only ones who know about it. In other words, it’s a
good
cult book. By the time you’ve finished it, the cult will be bigger by one.

It will change your life in little ways. For example, the opening scenes of
2001
will never look the same again, because you’ll be wondering which ape is Uncle Vanya. And you’ll find yourself thanking, next time you see one of those helpful little books that identify edible and poisonous mushrooms, all those hundreds of research ape-men who sacrificed their lives to establish precisely which was which.

And you can savour the true story that the germ of the idea for all this came to Roy Lewis when, as
The Economist
’s Commonwealth Affairs reporter in the mid-fifties, he asked the renowned anthropologist Louis Leakey to explain the meaning of some prehistoric cave paintings. Leakey
danced
the meaning for him.

From this, and from observations of the dismantling of British colonial rule in Africa, and from reflections on the depths of history that lay under the political goings-on, Lewis crafted this book.

The famous French biochemist Jacques Monod subsequently wrote to point out one or two technical errors, but added that they didn’t matter a damn because reading the book made him laugh so much he fell off a camel in the middle of the Sahara.

So sit on something solid.

April 1988 (somewhere in the Holocene)

or How the Bottom Has Dropped Out of the Wise Man Business

Western Daily Press
,
24 December 1970

All I wanted was gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Like a latter-day oriental king. That’s all. There couldn’t be a simpler Christmas shopping list. Easy, I thought. Basic.

I ended up in the middle of Broadmead, Bristol, in the rain, dressed like a refugee from
The Desert Song
and feeling like a very recently deposed Middle Eastern potentate.

I kept thinking: “You’re not cut out for this sort of thing. If they gave you a camel you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

I started out happily enough, I even took a carrier bag. That shows how innocent I was.

Gold. Well, that’s common enough, you get it in rings and teeth. Frankincense turned out to be a bittersweet-smelling powder; myrrh a medicinal gum.

Medicinal: I headed for Boots.

“Frankincense? Who makes it?” asked the lady in the perfume department.

Oh well. There were other chemists, and I tried them.

Cool lot, Bristol chemists.

They can take a request for frankincense and snap back a “Sorry sir, we don’t stock it” without batting an eyelid. Actually one did say, “Good God!”

I was advised to try the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.

“What? Oh. Really? We’d better telephone you back,” they said.

They came back to say:

“You’ve had us all searching. Apparently myrrh used to be used in a mouthwash. If you find the old type of chemist you might possibly still get it.”

Mouthwash didn’t sound right, but I pressed on. I found Mr. Pughe-Jones, a chemist in West Street, Bedminster.

“There isn’t the call for that type of thing now,” he said. “We used to sell myrrh before the war. There might be a bit left somewhere, but I doubt if I could find it.”

Then I began thinking: Perhaps it’s you. What you want is a bit of style. Perhaps people aren’t getting the message.

So off to Bristol Arts Centre to be kitted up at short notice as an oriental prince.

The robe was last worn by Herod. I said I wasn’t snobbish.

“It’s not too bad,” said the wardrobe mistress, surveying me critically, “after all, they’d been on a long journey.”

Cool lot, Bristol shoppers. No one took a blind bit of notice of an oriental prince hopping along trying to keep his cloak out of puddles.

This is what happens to a Wise Man who wants to buy gold in Bristol …

If he goes to the Bank of England he gets handed a form by a sympathetic young man. He soon learns that it’s no good asking for gold just because you want some.

He is told: “I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but that’s just about the worst possible reason you can give.”

If he’s a real wise guy he gives up then. That form is awfully ominous. A third of it is in capital letters, and full of phrases like
FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH CONDITIONS
.

If he’s just persistent he visits a few jewellers. I did. I was shown a solid gold napkin ring which I very nearly bought till I snapped out of it.

It’s no good. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh don’t get a look in.

Next year I’ll just buy a hamper.

Three kings in Bristol would just find their camels towed away for parking offences.

But of course they didn’t pass through Bristol—wise men.

Bath and West Evening Chronicle
,
24 April 1976

It was a brief shopping list I took to London: gold. I got it. But that’s hardly a beginning, is it?

Michael Ayrton, sculptor, novelist, artist, and wide-ranging genius, died not long ago. I met him twice. I can think of no other person whose death has affected me so much, even so.

He wrote a book called
The Maze Maker
, based on the life of the
half-mythical craftsman Daedalus. He was the father of Icarus, and built the wings—in the book, the primitive hang glider—on which his son failed so spectacularly to defy the sun.

I don’t think it was ever a bestseller, but for many people it is still a book to return to again and again.

Well, anyway. One achievement Daedalus is credited with is the casting, in gold, of a honeycomb, and in the book Ayrton suggested how it might have been done.

To cast in metal you can make a wax model, envelop it in a sort of plaster cast, melt out the wax, and fill the impression. And a honeycomb is its own wax mould. Was it really possible? So compelling was the description, I decided to have a go.

Daedalus decorated his honeycomb with bees cast in gold. You can treat the dead insect like wax, and burn out the ash of its creation in its mould.

It was November. I enrolled at a local silversmithing evening class, which enabled me to buy gold. Gold! They sell it in high-countered little shops in London, festooned with the stuff like a metal delicatessen. I bought enough—well, enough to see, if you looked closely—and rather more silver. Silver’s okay, you can buy silver like sweets, it’s gold that has the mystery.