Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (42 page)

I know little of the countryside, and less of its juridical arcana. While I know that you cannot kill pheasants in July, I do not know what happens to those who do. Nor do I know if different laws obtain regarding pheasants wild and raised; did this corpse belong to a bloke who had lovingly hand-reared it so that he could lovingly plug it next October, and if so, might I not owe him something? The road was deserted, which was one answer to all such questions. I opened the boot; I put the pheasant in. After all, just to leave it there would have made its death meaningless; as links in the food chain went, it was one of the plumper.

‘I'm not pulling its stuff off,' said my wife. ‘Or out.'

‘Just read the map,' I said. ‘We don't wish to hang around Westley Waterless, now.'

‘We never did,' said my wife, ‘but that didn't stop us.'

We were, however, luckier this time. We found the way to Stump Cross, which is where you halt in order to have a row about whether to take the B184 or the M11. And, after a bit, to say hang on, what's that peculiar noise in the boot?

That little I know about the countryside does not embrace the habitat of pheasants. Is Essex all right for Suffolk ones? Not that I could have done anything about it if it wasn't; when I opened the lid, the corpse shot by me like a clay pigeon. Who knows, maybe it will find its way back to Westley Waterless? If, that is, it has the sense to ignore the signposts.

73
And Did Those Feet?

W
e didn't get corn circles in Cricklewood. You need corn. This left us marginalised from the great summer debate, and glum. For urban life is short on magic, and even mystery is brief: you usually conclude, after a bit, that it wasn't the fairies who nicked your milk, nor a warlock's curse that flattened your battery. Likewise, few midnight knocks betoken a time-warped Saracen or a basketful of royal foundlings; it is generally a minicabbie looking for Fulham.

What envy, then, we felt, down here, for lucky rural folk! We, too, wanted to squat in moonlit fields, craning to catch Titania treading a measure in the cereal, or listening out for a tinny voice to cry: ‘We mean you no harm, Earthlings, see we bring Venusian toffees, and humorous T-shirts for your emir!' Even a hoaxer would have left a welcome hiccup on the flat oscillograph of our lives: what fun to have sprung out on Jeremy Beadle, just as he finished rolling his bogus circumference, and thrashed him to within an inch of his life!

But it was not to be. The corn got cut, the winter came, the country people snuggled happily beneath their thatch to dream of next season's yet weirder phenomena, and, down here, we ground our jealous teeth and reconciled ourselves to puzzling out, instead, the mystery of the single currency. It may not have come from Pluto or Cloud-cuckoo-land, but it was as close as we were ever going to get.

Until this morning. This morning, I looked out from an upper window on to a lawn thick with hoar-frost. Pretty enough, but that was not what made the heart lurch: for there, etched into the twinkling rime, was a huge circle, so impeccable as to suggest a 10ft set of compasses. No tracks led to it, nor any away; though shortly, as you may imagine, mine did both. I was on the lawn in a trice.

They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!
Was this the fabled corn circle of the Baskervilles? Alas no; I peered closer, freezing a knee: these could not belong to any dog. No dog has a heel and five toes. Then again, no human being has a foot two inches long. And then even more again, what beast, be it canine or human, can materialise in the middle of a large lawn, leaving no trace of its passage thither, impress a perfect circle, and vanish as trackless as it came?

I ran back into the house, and up to the attic. You know the kind of box: it always has
The Coral Island
in it, and
Kennedy's Shortbread Eating Primer
, a few dead bees, and right at the bottom,
Tracking Made Easy
, which some dumb uncle bought you 40 years ago because he thought you might need to identify spoor left in your parent's fifth-floor flat, could be an okapi, funny place, Cockfosters.

So I took it outside, and I knelt again, with the book open at British mammals, and you would not believe the variety of feet that walk upon England's mountains green, but when it came to what had walked upon Cricklewood's garden white, nothing. As far as Capt. John Wills-Bourne, late of the Selous Scouts, was concerned, this footprint did not exist.

So I telephoned the Natural History Museum.

‘It is most probably,' said the NHM woman, in that gentle but firm voice so often employed when talking to the deranged, ‘a hedgehog circle. This is how they feed.'

‘It is not a hedgehog's print,' I said, ‘and even if it were, the hedgehog would be the size of a bulldog. Anyway, how could it leave no track but the circle?'

‘It might,' said the woman, ‘be a stoat or similar dropped by an owl. If it was hurt, it might have run in a circle until the owl retrieved it.'

I consulted
Tracking Made Bloody Impossible
again, to be certain.

‘It is not a stoat,' I insisted, ‘nor similar. And whatever it is, an owl could not have picked it up. A condor possibly, but this is Cricklewood.'

‘If you fax us a photo,' sighed the woman, ‘we'll try to identify it.'

So I went upstairs for the camera, and the sun was now streaming through the landing window; which I thought no more about, until I was back on the lawn. The frost had gone. The circle with it.

Theories c/o
The Times
on a postcard please. And country folk need not apply. They've had their turn.

74
Nothing But The Truth

I
f a man spends 30 years banging a key for money, it must follow that not everything he writes will come up to impeccable snuff.

There will be up days and down days, there will be up markets and down markets, but if hot meals are to be set upon tables and carpets laid upon floorboards, if pipes are to be professionally plumbed and cats professionally wormed, and if children are not to be dispatched barefoot to school (perhaps for no better reason than to escape the spectacle of their mother taking in washing at the back door even as the bailiffs at the front are distraining upon their father's chattels), then, willy-nilly, the loin must be girt and, though the
mots
may not always be
justes
, the quota filled.

Yet if those three decades have therefore spewed much of which I was not proud, they had not, until yesterday, delivered anything of which I was actually ashamed. But when I recall yesterday's
oeuvre
, it pumps the blood into the cheeks, even as the pump itself plummets to the bottom of the boots. Worse, yesterday I put my name to a piece of writing which could settle my professional hash for good.

Its plot was generated some nights earlier, when the next-door burglar alarm sounded. This did not greatly agitate me since it is a capriciously sensitive item and had doubtless responded to a raindrop or a coughing dog, but I went into the front garden to check – one of my dahlias might have fallen over – whereupon the lamp-light revealed a man paused at my neighbour's gate. Had this passer-by spotted something? I ran back, phoned the police, and ran out again with the idea of asking the man what he had seen.

It now dawned on me that what he had seen was the inside of the house, because he was disappearing up the road at a clip too nimble to be innocent. I clipped after, but before I could close upon him he darted into the unlit playing-fields opposite, and there is an age beyond which you do not follow the unknown into the invisible. Fortunately, even as my
amour propre
seeped, a police car hurtled around the corner, flung open its rear door at my wave, and we plunged together in a pursuit which happily ended at the quarry's collar.

As the result of which, I was of course required to make a statement. That I was not required to make it immediately was, I felt, all to the good: recollecting emotion in tranquillity means you can marshal a few smart adjectives and get the semi-colons right. Accordingly, when the CID amanuensis fronted up yesterday, I was ready. He opened his pad, I my mouth, and we set off together towards the Booker Prize.

I had never dictated a story before. Habituated to pecking syllables off a keyboard in between staring out of the window, I had not realized how wonderfully the mind was concentrated by sitting opposite a bloke with a big fat pad and an urgent ballpoint. The stuff poured out.

It was pretty good: true, there was a nod to Wilkie Collins, a whiff of Chandler, but it was in the main my own, and it rattled along a treat. As the policeman scribbled, I thought, this is a watershed, I could do trilogies, I wonder if he'd like to earn a bob or two on his day off?

We finished, and he passed the pad across. Was it, he enquired, a true record of the facts, would I sign it to this effect, would I attend court?

I read it. I said yes. It came out as a croak. For, though every fact was true, every embellishment had gone. The copper was as remarkable an editor as I had ever met. As he wrote, he subbed: it is a great art, though that is not what it produces. It produces
Janet and John
.

Soon, I shall be in court. Defence counsel rises. His client is alleged to have been caught bang to rights. His only course is to discredit the witness. He settles his gold pince-nez. He reads. ‘I saw a man. The man was at the gate. The man had a brown jacket. He ran up the road. I ran after him. I got quite close. The man had little ears. The man ran across the road. I ran . . .'

Defence counsel tosses the sheaf aside, and takes off his pince-nez. ‘Mr Coren, you have described yourself to this court, under oath, as a writer . . .'

The Last Decade
2000–2007

STEPHEN FRY

Introduction

‘L
ana' was my putrid anagrammatical camp name for him. ‘Thank you for not making it Anal,' he said. Alan Coren was fixed in my mind from an early age as the kind of person I wanted to be. It was always his wit on the radio that stuck in the mind more than anyone else's. Some time in the late 1970s he was on a quiz show involving quotations.

‘What were Queen Anne's last words?'

‘Alas, with me dies a whole period in table legs?' he ventured. Very Coren because clever without being clever-clever; funny, very funny without being modish or mean-spirited; and very Coren because it makes you go: ‘Grrr. I wish my synapses could fire like that.'

In interview I heard him asked if he ever saved up bons mots either for the dinner table or for articles. ‘No,' he said, ‘if it can't come when bidden then I'll retire. I'm a hack not an artist.' Hack is a tough word, but he was a professional certainly, like Wodehouse or Coward. It is easier to admire and to like a pro than most artists, I have found. Artists are always feeling sorry for themselves, pros can't afford feelings of self-pity.

E.M. Forster once delivered a cruel but devastating two-word blow to
Punch
: ‘suburban sniggers'.

During his masterful editorship of that magazine and the years following it, Alan slowly developed a full persona, that of Cricklewood Man: angry, exasperated, contemptuous and yet somehow never merely bilious or inelegantly splenetic. And certainly no sniggerer. He lifted
Punch
out of its self-satisfaction and introduced, not before time, the comedy of the fractured self. He owed much to Perelman, Thurber and Leacock, but that is no more than to say that P.G. Wodehouse owed a lot to George and Weedon Grossmith, W.S. Gilbert and Jerome K. Jerome: the pupil often matches, and sometimes outstrips, the master.

Bill Davies, Alan's predecessor at
Punch
, came into the office one day proudly bearing a dummy issue of the new magazine he was editing: British Airways'
High Life,
the first of a new generation of ultra-glossy airline magazines. Davies had got many of his
Punch
freelancers to contribute and he was anxious to know Coren's opinion.

Alan looked carefully through it. ‘Congratulations, Bill,' he said, ‘British Airways will be the first airline where you read the sick-bag and throw up into the in-flight magazine.'

Yes, Alan could be cruel. Cruel is funny when it is applied to those who can take it. No one who is truly funny will entirely avoid the jugular or the groin. Alan, so far as I am aware, only ever chose one of his own weight when it came to a no-holds-barred wit fight; he never bullied. He never lost either, you can bet that.

How he managed to be angry, alive, contemporary and complete as a humorist without ever revealing his real political, cultural, social, sexual, psychological self is a mystery to me. I wish I could have mastered that particular art. But I wish I could have mastered much of what Alan was. He lacked self-consciousness; that I admire, too. He had, as it happens, a fertile and perceptive brain outside the unrepentantly middle-class arena of his humour. Fortunately, the censoring membrane of wit never allowed him to become pompous about the genuine intellect within. Something else I could still learn from him . . .

He was kind to me personally on the achingly few occasions we met, but it was the kindness of his lifelong work as a humorist that mattered. He stimulated, fondled and rewarded parts of my brain that no one else has ever been able to reach.

75
Radio Fun

T
oday is a really big day. That is why I have just finished servicing and polishing my father's old Ferguson. See how it gleams! Savour how it smells!

Hear how it thunders when I start it up!

I haven't given my old man's Ferguson such a seeing to in the 15 years since he died, when I took it from his place and brought it to mine. I should say here (since it has just occurred to me that unlikely pictures may be forming in your mind's eye), that it is not an old Ferguson tractor, it is an old Ferguson wireless. It was given to my parents as a wedding present in 1935, and a very snazzy present it was; I stress this only because younger readers may think of a wireless, if they even know the word, as a titchy plastic box you clip onto your belt for jogging. They may never have seen a walnut and rosewood number the size and simulacrum of a Sheraton sideboard, standing on four sturdy cabriole legs, with six brass knobs on the front to fine-tune three enormous dials that glow in three different colours to let you know they're in business, we are Long, Short and Medium, sir, begging your pardon, sir, and we are here to serve you, we await your pleasure, sir, you have only to twiddle. It is a wireless worth getting married for.