Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (40 page)

That first whammy – for those of you still standing, albeit still reeling – was borne by last weekend's
Sunday Times
, which, quite properly, gave over much of its front page to the shattering global news that Martin Amis was quitting the UK for New York, to escape media scrutiny and public pre-occupation with his advances, his partner, and his teeth, to flee the new politics for which he so recently voted but with which he is now disappointed (he confesson himself nostalgic for Baroness Thatcher), to shed the ‘middle-class boredom', of Britain and – since ‘I have only got one big London book left to write – emigrate to where the history of the next century is already being written'.

What an extraordinary and culturally devastating coincidence! For I, too, have been suffering those self-same torments and, having come to those self-same conclusions, am determined to leave Cricklewood for good. I have only one big Cricklewood column left to write – it will address man's eternal quest to discover why, four years ago, a Barnet council workman bothered to draw a red ring around the pothole outside my house, when it remains a pothole to this day – and, as soon as it is written, I shall be off.

I have had more than enough of media scrutiny (the
Ham
& High
rings up every summer to ask which paperback I am taking on holiday) and as for the public's preoccupation with my advances, every time I bring a book out someone asks me what I got for it and then nods and says he'd always wondered why I was forced to do so much daytime television, doesn't your wife work? Whereupon, my having replied that she is a doctor, he immediately rolls his trousers up and asks her to have a look at his knee, so if Martin thinks society is obsessed with his partner, let me ask him how often the radiant Isabel has been required to feel a wonky patella during her soup course while simultaneously trying to avoid the eye of the woman opposite who has clearly been stitched up, every which way, by a dodgy plastic surgeon and now, alerted by the exposed joint, wants to know whom to sue?

As for my teeth, preoccupation with these is reaching hysteria: I have this year alone had six reminders from my dentist to come in for a check-up, each more threatening than the last. Any day now I expect to hear the unmistakable noise of a man towing a drill up a garden path, so the sooner I change addresses the better.

And yes, like Martin, I am disillusioned with new Tony. It's been weeks now, and nobody in Cricklewood seems better educated, healthier, richer or more caring. All that has happened is that The Cricklewood Arms, our only middle-class pub, has changed its name to The Ferret & Firkin, which seems, so far, to have done little to lift the boredom for which it has been a byword throughout the 25 years I have been going in, having a quick pint, and going out again, without anyone looking up from the
Daily Mail
crossword.

There used, mind, to be a fairly interesting greengrocer opposite, he had once played in goal for Cyprus, but his wife left him last year and he went back to Nicosia.

So I have concluded, like Martin, that enough is enough (and here I must apologise to the Editor, who was desperate to run the story as a front-page lead until I told him that, if he did, my only column idea was this pothole with a red ring around it) and it is time to pack my traps and quit Cricklewood.

I am going where the history of the next century is already being written. I have often sat in its shimmering gridlock, day and night, rapt with envy at the radiant hypermarkets and bustling fast-food outlets and teeming wine bars of the city that never sleeps. And I, too, am nostalgic for Lady Thatcher. I shall emigrate to Finchley.

67
Lo, Yonder Waves the Fruitful Palm!

I
t is a soft March morning in 1871, and on the drive outside a sturdy London villa, the gravel crunches. Inside, a woman starts, looks up from her davenport, and drops her pen. A sudden vibration shakes her bodice. She knows that crunch. It is three long years since it crunched away, but hardly a day has gone by without her ear's being cocked for its crunching back. She runs to the door, and flings it wide.

‘Lawks-a-mercy!' she cries, for popular fiction has been her only consolation during those lonely months, ‘Mr Forster!'

‘Good morning, Mrs Forster,' replies her husband, ‘I am home!'

He enters, removes his topee, bends his sunbleached sideburns to her joyful peck, and places upon their hall table the subject of this chapter.

‘And was your expedition fruitful?' enquires Mrs Forster, as her bosom settles.

‘Not only fruitful, dearest,' he replies, ‘but seedful, flowerful, and, yes, cormful, too!' (for as well as being a great botanist, he is also a great wag), ‘and see, I bring you the most illustrious of my trophies!'

Her adoring gaze turns for the first time from his face, towards the hall table. ‘What is it?' she says.

‘It is a potted palm,' replies her husband. ‘Henceforth, no seaside string quartet will ever be the same. It is found only on Lord Howe Island in the Pacific, and since it was found only by me, it is called Howea Forsteriana. Even now, a clipperload is pulling into Tilbury, for the greater glory of English botany. I intend knocking them out at five bob a time, including earthenware tub and watering instructions.'

And now, as Mrs Forster swoons, the scene dissolves to another sturdy London villa, another soft March morning, exactly 120 years later, and another great botanist. On this occasion, his is the trembling bosom. He is staring at a polythene cloche tantalizingly fogged by condensation. He is, in apt concord with everything round him, rooted to the spot. Why is he not budging?

To find out, we must, having teleported ourselves this far, now go back six months, to an evening in September when the great botanist went to fill his dustbin, and found his Howea Forsteriana standing beside it. His wife had thrown it out, on the grounds that it was dead. The great botanist brought it back inside, on the grounds that one green frond was still hanging on, and observed to his wife that you wouldn't bin a canary with 90 per cent moult. You would attempt to revive it.

His wife said it was horrible to look at. The botanist, while forced to agree that the item could no longer be classed as decor, maintained that this was no reason to murder it. He had enjoyed a happily symbiotic relationship with the plant for ten years; when he breathed out, it breathed in, and vice-versa. They were mates. If you will not have it in the house, said the botanist, I shall stick it in the garden. At this, his wife selected a sharp snort from her professional repertoire, and pointed out that his moribund friend was a sensitive tropical soul who would not last five minutes out there.

The botanist glared at her for a bit, and slunk off to phone Kew. No chance, Kew corroborated, and went on to tell him more about William Forster than he thought he'd ever need, but there you are, journalism is full of surprises, you never know your luck. Most to the point, they said that Lord Howe Island did not know the meaning of the word frost.

But the great botanist did not know the meaning of the word defeat. In a sheltered southern corner of his garden, he either planted or buried the palm, depending on whether he or his wife was telling it. He then put a polythene cloche over it, leaned a sheet of plate glass against it, and, in due course, watched the snow fall on it.

That is why, this March morning, he cannot budge. He dares not. Could be a corpse underneath. But he is not the great Forster's heir for nothing. He girds his loin; moves the glass; lifts the cloche.

There is a palm-tree there. It has new green stalks, and new green leaves. It has not merely survived the winter, it has thrived on it. This is the Tropic of Cricklewood. The great botanist does not, however, pause to preen. He runs to the dustbin.

They had a mango last night, and some fool threw away the pip.

68
Fabric Conditioning

I
sat next to Peter Palumbo a year or so ago, at one of those nominally informal bunfights where ‘Just a Few Close Friends' is hand-scribbled on the embossed paste board, and when you get there two liveried footmen shuck you from your Pakamac and the third shouts your name into a room containing most of the
Almanack de Gotha
, half the cabinet, and a shoal of tycoons not yet on remand, and you immediately begin asking yourself what your host thinks it is you've got that one of his other guests wants, because you were not born yesterday.

Anyway, Palumbo was an agreeable enough cove, he didn't spill anything on me or try that trick with the cutlery where you bang the spoon and the fork does a somersault, and I was therefore not surprised to learn, a few months later, that he had been made chairman of the Arts Council; if you keep going to informal dinners with Just a Few Friends night after night, and don't knock over the potted palms, you have only yourself to blame when the scrap of paper that unexpectedly falls out of your hat in the homegoing Roller turns out to have a black spot on it.

Especially if you cannot forbear from banging on publicly about the Cultural Fabric of the Nation: it is the one phrase of his I recall from that night's exchanges, and each time he loosed it, I rose snapping to the fly, ticking off the threat to that fabric, i.e., to theatre, film, music, books, painting – and, by Stilton time, to glove-puppetry and synchronized origami – from the Philistine hordes yomping behind a Delilah whose manic shears were cutting everything in sight. Palumbo's eyes would glaze excitedly at each new convoluted metaphor, oddly like those of a man attempting to remember a previous engagement, but whether my shafts were scoring it was not only impossible to say, it did not really matter, since I had no idea, then, that he would ever be in a position to do anything about them.

Indeed, the meeting lay forgotten until I opened last Friday's
Times
, where, lurking at the foot of page 5, was the phrase ‘the Arts Council's plan to restore the cultural fabric of the nation by the year 2000'. Hallo, I thought, its new Akela cleaves unswerving to his mission, there will be a bob or two in this for hack and mummer, might I not be of even further assistance than last time? I phoned the Arts Council.

‘This cultural fabric,' I said, ‘what, precisely, does it . . .'

‘To quote the chairman,' said the Arts Council, ‘cathedrals are the greatest cultural glory of this country. He plans to refurbish their fabric by means of a full partnership between the public and private sectors. Other major public buildings, too, of course . . .'

I put the phone down. Bloody buildings. The man had not listened to a word I'd shrieked. He was a literalist: to him, fabric was no metaphor. New conks for gargoyles was what he was after, and a bit of Brasso on the weathercock. Naturally, the private sector would cough up for that: there is nothing iffy about a cathedral, shareholders will not leap up at AGMs and complain about chucking a million at York Minister. On the contrary, it is no bad thing for a board to be seen as God's benefactors, it is a corking plea in mitigation should their hands get trapped in the till, it has a thick edge over backing unframed paintings or unrhymed verse or unknighted actors.

And what irks me almost as much is that, even for the literalist, cathedrals should top the list when our cultural fabric is under charitable review. Someone will always look after cathedrals. Had I identified, that night, the true bee in Palumbo's bonnet, I should have turned myself into the Spirit of Cultural Fabric Yet to Come, dragged him down to Cricklewood, made him cringe at butchered conversion and greenfield encroachment, at junkfood facia and bunkered parking, at jerrycobbled estate and polystyrene precinct; I should have cocked his ear to the curfew tolling the knell of parting suburbia.

Bit late now. The window of opportunity has slammed, and one of the very few shortcomings of mock-mullioned double-glazing in snugfit cedarette surround is you can't hear anyone shouting through it.

69
Numbers Racket

You will, of course, remember the opening sequence of
A Matter of Life and Death
. How could you not? It was a seminal moment in the history of telecommunications. No one who cares about phones could ever forget it. I wonder sometimes whether even Powell and Pressburger realized the magnitude of what they had stumbled upon: they probably thought they were just making a film about life and death.

The credits fade to reveal David Niven, piloting his bomber back from Germany. Things are not good. The Germans have taken exception to being assaulted by an actor in a cardboard Lancaster, and set fire to it. Furthermore, Niven has suffered a nasty head wound, as the result of heavy ketchup over the Ruhr. He is not going to make it back. We know this from his smile. It is the smile of a man whose director has just suggested that he should appear to have met with Triumph and Disaster and to be treating those two impostors just the same, though not for much longer.

It is at this point that he begins to trawl the ether, seeking some sympathetic voice to say pip-pip to. But nothing negotiates the RT save static – until, suddenly, a girl's voice crackles. It is Kim Hunter, a toothsome American wireless operator: as they chat, her bee-stung mouth trembles, her velvet eyes brim, and, even though the skipper has never seen her and can have no inkling that Miss Hunter is a little stunner, they fall in love. It is her voice which enraptures him. It is the last thing he hears as he goes into his terminal plummet.

What follows is two hours of fey tosh, with Niven dangling in limbo while supernal advocates dispute whether he is alive or dead, until he is duly redeemed by the love of the operator and allowed to resurrect. But none of that mattered. I knew this even at the age of 10, when I tottered, blinking, from the Southgate Odeon. What mattered was the core-truth; which was that you never knew who you might run into at the telephone exchange.

For four decades, that notion of limitless possibility sustained me. Nor – which has not always been the case with other dreams – did disillusion lie in wait for it with a sockful of sand. I have had some delightful natters, oft in the stilly night, with operators; many a chat, flirtatious, comical, subversive, has warmed the wires between us. Could be directory enquiries, who, as their wet thumb flicked the pages, would rabbit revealingly of this and that; could be some reverse-chargehand answering with a mouthful of pork pie, and before you knew it you were into an engaging exchange about nocturnal indulgence; could be just one of those who happened to be giggling as they connected, and you said what's the joke, and she said we're having a bit of a laugh down here, Denise is getting married Wednesday to this bloke with a peculiar walk, and from there it was but a short step to intimate conspiracies.