Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (36 page)

I walked across to the clock, prised open the door with my forefinger, and peered into the cuckoo's premises. It was not there. It had flown its tiny coop. To make doubly sure, I forefingered the minute-hand around to eight o'clock: the door burst open, the voice cried eight times, but what leapt out on each of these eight occasions was nought but a wobbling spring. The cuckoo was not on the end of it.

Where had it gone? And why? Had it, perhaps, in ecstasy at finding it had the house to itself, hurtled so joyously from its cavity that it had detached itself from its tiny umbilicus? Or heard, maybe, the rumour of a sparrow-clock somewhere, and gone off to lay an egg in it?

Unlikely. It is, in truth, only half a cuckoo. It is little more than a head on a spring. I cannot speak for more expensive clocks, it may well be that the Swiss houses of parliament sport a giant example which hourly lurches from its penthouse atop Big Bird intact in every particular, but mine, sadly, does not have the wherewithal to parturiate. It does not even have legs. It could not have gone far. I searched the kitchen floor. Nothing.

Had a clockwork cat got in?

I wondered if the head might have fallen off not forwards at all, but backwards. It could be lying on the floor of the works, struggling ventriloquially every time the spring sprang out. It dawned upon me that Wordsworth must have suffered similar horological shock; nothing else could explain so awful a line as ‘O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird, or but a wandering voice?' It is exactly what the old fool would have cried upon walking into Dove Cottage to find himself confronted with a headless chime.

I took the clock from the wall, and removed the back, appropriately enough, with my Swiss Army knife. Exactly, I'm sure, what the Swiss Army would have done in the circumstances. The head was not inside.

Three days have now passed, and some 50 phone calls. Can you believe that there is not a spare cuckoo head to be found anywhere in these islands? I tried this morning to fashion one from Plasticine, with a little matchstick beak, but it was too heavy, it lumbered out on the first cry, hung dangling over the clockface, and refused to go back until manhandled.

I do not know what to do. I may have to junk the clock. The kitchen is below my bedroom, I hear the cry in the small hours, and I would swear a derisory note has crept into it. They do change their tune, you know.

53
Salt in the Wound

I
experienced a remarkable concatenation yesterday. I had gone to the Italian Driving School in Clerkenwell Road to make an enquiry on a friend's behalf (sensitively refraining from making any on my own, despite burning to know about the teaching of Italian driving, eg how to steer with your chin so that you can simultaneously keep the hooter depressed and leave both hands free, one to shake its fist, the other to raise its central finger), and when I came out again, I found myself a bit peckish, so I bought a packet of Smith's potato crisps.

I strolled on, thinking of nothing in particular, when I chanced to notice a blue plaque, high up on a redbrick wall at the corner of Hatton Garden, attesting to the curious fact that Sir Hiram Maxim (1840–1916), inventor of the machine-gun, had lived there.

That is the kind of information which suddenly makes one think of something in particular. While I already knew a bit about the great man – including the tragedy wherein a malicious Fate cruelly snatched him away in June, robbing him by only a few short days of the chance to see his greatest masterpiece, the First Battle of the Somme – I had no idea that this was where he had hung his hat. How tolerant landladies must have been, then! Not to mention the people in the flat downstairs; but, then again, you might think twice, might you not, before banging on the ceiling and thereby getting on the wrong side of a man who had just been practising at 500 rounds a minute?

These and similar woolgatherings having brought me to the end of the packet of crisps, I looked for a wastebin; and that I could not immediately spot one was what brought on the remarkable concatenation. I put the empty bag back in my pocket, where it remained until I got into the bus on Farringdon Road and dug for change. The bag was now in my hand again, where, by sheer chance, a word leapt off it and into my eye, the way this word, as I may have mentioned before, will. On the top right-hand corner of the packet, this legend ran: ‘Frank Smith sold Britain's first crisps to the pubs of Cricklewood. The salt-cellars he provided vanished as fast as the crisps. The little blue twist of salt was his ingenious solution.'

Well I never. I mean, literally. Twenty years in Cricklewood, and I had never caught whiff nor whisper of our greatest son: for how else was one to describe a man who had invented not only the crisp, but also the little bag of salt to be a helpmeet for it? This was major genius. It was as if the Earl of Sandwich had come up with the pickled onion. Research was urgently called for. And when, an hour later, I rang Smith's (or as it now is,
eheu fugaces
, PepsiCo Foods International), one who still remembers the old days remembered them for me.

In 1920, Frank Smith was a young Cricklewood grocer, left to mind the shop while his employer holidayed in France. When the employer returned, he brought with him a wondrous tale of a little French restaurant where he had been served with thinly-sliced fried potatoes. He then got back to doing what employers do, leaving Frank to do what geniuses do. Geniuses have a bit of a think. After which, they remove their apron, politely hand in their notice, pop round to a bank manager whom they have circumspectly ensured never went short of a nice bit of gammon even in the darkest days of the recent hostilities, and buy the lease on a rundown Cricklewood garage which the instinct of genius tells them is just the place to begin manufacturing potato crisps.

How could it fail? It did not. The only commercial setback was that as Cricklewood's boozers fell upon Smith's delectable invention, they ungratefully nicked the saltpots he had loaned them. Smith, however, was up to that. Smith took fresh guard. The answer was in the bag.

I put the phone down, and dried my eyes, and drove to where the original garage used to be. It is now a B & Q superstore. I trekked its every wall, but there was nothing to show. What an odd world it is that reveres the machine-gun but not the crisp! Surely it is time to offer the honour of a small blue plaque? Preferably one with a twist in it.

54
Good God, That's Never The Time? (2)

F
ifty-two? No age, they said. Fifty-two?
These
days? No age! They said it all day Wednesday. Rang up, dropped in, brought presents, popped corks, filled the premises with cheery cards (albeit mainly about impotence and coffins), shouted, through clouds of marzipan crumbs, what Gladstone did at 87, what Picasso did at 83, what Rubinstein did at 88.

Convinced me utterly. Despite what, after 50, has become the annual shock of seeing it written down, I did not feel what 52 sounded as if one should feel like. After tea, I went over to the club and played three sets without dying, and it was one of those good days when the Fate who handles the fortuity portfolio allows the ball to coincide with the racquet more often than not, and you think,
Bring me Ivan! Bring me
Boris!
, and you jog home feeling good, despite the little bird trilling beside you to the effect that even if they were to bring you Fred Perry, you'd be going back on a stretcher.

And when what was lowered into the subsequent bath appeared to displace no more water than it had done when its digits were in reverse order, and when its glottis proved still competent to handle
Ol' Man River
without a quiver at either end of the register, and when its teeth stood up to the Extra Hard without the hint of a wobble, and especially when it sloshed on its new skin bracer, tautening each incipient wrinkle to the sleekness of a snare-drum, could it not be forgiven for murmuring to itself: ‘52? No age!'

So I skipped downstairs, and I decanted lunch's dissimilar dregs into a single tumbler with that nonchalance which springs from the conviction that 52 is no age for a liver, either, and I set about tearing wrappers from the rest of my presents with these amazingly youthful fingers I have, and, oh what fun!, someone had given me a video called
1938: A Year To Remember
.

I put it on. It was a compilation of Pathé newsreels. Black and white, of course. No colour newsreels, then. And who is this, stepping out of a piston-engined item at what the commentator, in his jovial cut-glass accent, tells me is an aerodrome? The chap is waving a piece of paper. He has a wing-collar on. He is surrounded by photographers in three-piece suits. They keep removing bulbs from what look like frying-pans. The commentator is very happy. ‘This is the greatest diplomatic triumph of modern times!' he cries.

And what's this? The scene has changed. ‘A new giant of the sky is floating into the mist on its maiden flight!' This is September 1938. I am already on strained solids. I am older than the Graf Zeppelin.

Oh, look, here comes sport. Wimbledon finals day. Men leaping about in long trousers. ‘And so we say farewell to Bunny Austin!' Tonight, it will be Donald Budge leading Helen Wills Moody on to the parquet. What will they murmur, as they waltz decorously at arm's length? That they would be able to go home on the Queen Elizabeth, if only it had been launched? Oh, look, there it is being launched now. Not the QE2, of course. There wasn't anyone to name a QE2 after, yet, except that little girl running about.

That's her father, now, on a beach, surrounded by small boys. He is singing ‘Ooja! Ooja! Rub A Dub A Dub!' It makes a change from trekking round council estates. ‘Their majesties go into humble homes!' shrieks the commentator. ‘This Hoxton house is 12 shillings a week!'

There is a child outside, in a pram. I crane: could it be? Too late, here is Hutton knocking up 364, here is a flying-boat inaugurating the England-Australia run, here is six-year-old Teddy Kennedy opening the Children's Zoo, here is Gracie, singing as we go, here is Englishman Dick Seaman winning the German grand prix in what appears to be a Mercedes soap-box car. Dick has a swastika round his neck.

The End. And, at that exact moment, a Lancaster thrums overhead, rattling the sashes, and I run outside just in time to see it, flanked by a Spitfire and a Hurricane. How nice of Tom King to lay it on, if a little
de trop
. It's not as if I'm 90, or anything, like the Queen Mother.

Just 52. No age, these days. Hardly older than a Lancaster.

55
Japanese Sandmen

I
have returned to Cricklewood to find that our local futon centre has closed down. I realize that, in the great roster of homecoming trauma, this ranks somewhere below Odysseus's dog dropping dead or Scarlett's discovery that Tara is going to need a bob or two spent on fixtures and fittings, but nevertheless it has come as a considerable shock.

Not because the closure spells, I suspect, the end of some sort of era, nor even because, in the nine years during which I have driven past it every day, the futon centre has become a much-loved feature of the landscape, but because I never once, in all those thousands of days, stopped and walked into it to find out what a futon was. I shall never walk into it now, and I shall never know.

Mind you – were I to be utterly honest – I cannot be certain that I should ever have plucked up the courage to do it. The time for asking what a futon was passed some years ago. You have to be quick off the blocks with fad-enquiries, if you do not wish to sound like a high court judge looking up from his jotting quill to enquire of the clerk what a hula-hoop is when it's at home. Even in the matter of bedding: I asked what a duvet was as soon as I heard the word, and to this day I get cold shudders when I think of the ridicule a week's delay would have invited. As for futons, one morning they did not exist, and the next morning, it seemed, everyone except me was banging on about them with remarkable authority. Since I tended to sidle away from these conversations in case I was exposed, I never did discover what they were, and soon everyone had stopped discussing them and gone on to cellphones and gravad lax, and it was too late.

Now, lest you begin to think me so untouchable a nerd that the authority of this entire opus is undermined, I should quickly say that I know
roughly
what a futon is. I can drag the new
OED
from its shelf as deftly as the next Waterstone browser, and I can read that a futon is a Japanese bed-quilt. This of course tells me nothing at all. Nor do the two quotations the OUP has dug up to endorse this definition, although they go back an astonishing long way for a fad, to 1876 and 1886 respectively. The first, taken from the
Transactions of the
Asiatic Society of Japan
, cites: ‘Those who are tired of tinned meats and live futons', and the second, attributed to one E.S. Morse, says: ‘The futons, or comforters, are hung over the balcony rail to air.'

I quote these arcana in their entirety. It is obvious that both Mr Morse and the Hon Sec of the ASJ were devout Nipponophiles attempting to curry face by showing that the round-eyes, too, are dab hands when it comes to banging out impenetrable
haikus
. I have little doubt that the latter gobbet does not mean what it superficially appears to say at all, and probably refers to the insolence of princes or something, and as for the former, it is a yen to a threepennybit that you could sit 50 structuralists in front of their decoders till Doomsday and they would never even come close.

No, when I say I do not know what futons are, I do not mean I do not know they are some kind of Japanese bedding (I have, after all, caught glimpses of them in the now-whitewashed window these nine years past); I mean that I do not know what is special about them. I have no idea what futonness comprises. What is the essence of its difference from a posture-sprung Slumberland, a chaise-longue, a hammock? Why, on that bright confident morning a decade ago, did everyone who was anyone, from Campden Hill to Tuscany, suddenly and simultaneously become excited by them?