Monday. Start the week

A bus to the shops

I was waiting for the bus to the shops when a passer-by told me that it had arrived five minutes early, and departed. This happens frequently and can mean waiting forty minutes for the next one.  It's infuriating.  Alternatively it comes late which, by comparison, is almost bearable.

During the journey itself (forty minutes later) the bus became full, and when you have a full bus in these parts you find that almost everyone knows everyone else. George’s baritone swaps agricultural jokes with Ted’s bass. And because Ted is sitting behind him he has to shout. Among the contraltos several Muriels and Emmas deliver the local news to each other and the treble female teenagers screech and squeal and leave my eardrums singing. When we have to stop in order for a lorryload of noisily-excited sheep to squeeze past it does invite comparison.

The journey takes about half an hour on a good day. It was so nice to get into the city.

Do you find that in adolescent male and female the human voice is undergoing change? I’m not referring to the curious way in which all teenage remarks sound like questions, with that upward inflection at the end. I’m thinking about voice production. Boys seem to have developed an indecipherable guttural, glottal-stopped bark with hardly any d’s or t’s sounded and girls appear to send as much of their voice as possible down their nose. This means, among other deficiencies, that they are physically unable to pronounce the 'oo' sound. For a demonstration ask any girl - from children to young adults - to sing you the Happy Birthday song and you will, I swear, hear 'Happy birthday tee yee'. (I speak of the UK; perhaps the rest of the English-speaking world has been protected.)

Of course, it could all be down to my crumbling hearing. And that, in turn, could be down to the bus journey home later that afternoon. The route passes a senior girls' school. At the stop close to the school a crowd of senior girls waited. The door opened and the sound of senior-girl screaming, squealing and shrieking filled the bus before they were on board. By the time they had occupied the rear half the level was so high I actually had both hands clamped over my ears. I now avoid that particular afternoon bus.

The ‘Red Lion’ stop came into view and I rang the bell.  I moved to the door and became aware that our young driver was not slowing down. I lowered my head, leaned into his compartment and gave a delicate cough, meaning to follow up with a request to stop.

Yes, I suppose my cough was a bit close to his ear but you wouldn’t think a little cough would frighten a young man. He leaped in his seat like a startled faun and jammed on the brakes so hard that I shot forward, narrowly missing the windscreen. I sensed that the rest of the passengers were piling up behind me and that was not a pleasant thought. We stopped and I apologised to all.

Glancing back as I stepped down there was a lot of suppressed activity on the road behind us. In overshooting the bus stop our driver had pulled up alongside a road island, or ‘refuge’, thus offering the speeding 4x4 truck behind us the choice between smacking into our bus or a couple of bollards. He chose the former but managed to stop short.

Horns sounded behind us and engines revved. After stepping down I did think of turning and raising my hat to everyone but good sense prevailed.

Stanley J. Sharpless

Scenario: Kodak UK conference room. Publisher's man has just finished discussing production matters concerning the company's PR journal and, with the rest, is about to leave. Advertising Manager enters, waits until others have left and places a light, restraining hand on man's shoulder. He speaks.

‘Paul, why not come and join us here at Kodak again? In Advertising. Full time. Do exactly what you’re doing for us now at Pergamon, but other things as well. We need someone like you. An editor. Art director. How much would you want?’

I avoided a direct answer, hoping an offer would exceed my present income by quite a lot. What they offered made me glad I hadn’t suggested a figure.

Stanley  J. Sharpless was urbane, immaculate in every way with the sort of countenance that made you feel he would know about fine wines. His light verse appeared in the literary journals. Their literary competitions were his favourite playground. The first of his work appeared in 1932 and made constant appearances on BBC Radio.

Twenty years earlier my essay on attending a concert with my girlfriend had got me into the Kodak Technical Publications Department. Ten years of writing easy-to-understand instructions for the users of Kodak equipment and materials left me wanting something different.

I left Kodak and opened a PR and technical publications department in Surrey and, after a couple of years, another in a medical college and hospital in North India. Then came the excitements of freelancing back in England. The freelancing led to being invited to join a London publisher, Newman Neame, part of Pergamon Press. One of their clients was the Kodak company, for whom they produced the pictorial 'glossy', Kodak View. They wanted me to take that on. I accepted and spent a few happy weeks in the heady atmosphere of a Fitzroy Square publishing house. One of the editors, a frenetically busy young man who seemed to run everywhere, turned out to be Michael De-La-Noy. Pleasant lunchtimes were enjoyed in Fitzroy Square Gardens, strolling among the trees and imagining past resident Virginia Woolf flashing her eyes at George Bernard Shaw and waving at Lord Salisbury. Not that they all lived there at the same time, but lunchtimes can drag.

Then came the hand of Stanley J. Sharpless on my shoulder and the invitation.

Try Googling these words: ‘cocoa coursing through their veins’ and meet the man who provided for me the sheer pleasure of sixteen years in advertising.

Dangerous territory

According to my father, I was a namby-pamby. By this he meant I could not swim, could not remember my multiplication tables, hated school and football and actually liked classical music. In effect, I was useless.

I agreed. Not outwardly, naturally. But I could see he was right.  I must have been a great disappointment to him. Stupidity has been my life companion. It provides plenty of material for stories and is thus ideal for blogs. The earliest event I can remember happened in the back garden, a narrow strip of lawn and vegetable area where runner beans and green peas and potatoes flourished. My father was cutting the grass. He asked me to fetch him the scissors. I was puzzled. But he was stooping by the longer grass that grew tight against the wooden fence, and I could see that in fact scissors would be perfect for getting behind the blades. I went indoors to the kitchen and brought him the scissors. I held them out to him and he stood, gazing at them and at me.

‘No!’ he cried. ‘The scissors! You know - the shears!’ Of course. He meant the garden shears. He was right. I should have known.

Whether or not stupidity played a part in my eventual suck-it-and-see progress through four different jobs during adolescence I can’t be sure, but I quite enjoyed the education provided. By the time His Majesty caught up with me at 18 and put me in the RAF I still had no idea of what I wanted to do, or to be.

But a beam of healing light was about to shine.

How the thought came to me I have no idea. I began to wonder if I could earn money by writing and drawing. I had always liked writing and drawing and scored high marks at school. But earning a living simply by putting words and sketches on paper had never occurred to me.

Eventually there came the information that the company for whom I already worked had a department wherein people sat at desks and wrote. It was called the Technical Publications Department and it employed people they called Authors. And they were looking for another Author. This, I decided, was straight out of a novel. Stupid boy discovers gold. But I hesitated. Was this thing sensible? Or was it stupid?

I plunged, and applied for the job. I was granted an appointment with the Editor but on the condition that I first provide an essay. The subject and length were for me to decide.

This was going to be tricky. Technical, to show I was that way inclined? In blank verse to show I could do it? And would short be clever? Or long? I began to warm to doing something unexpected. A few weeks earlier I had sat with my girlfriend at an orchestral concert in the then plush surroundings of Watford Town Hall. With the accompanying delight of having the girl’s shoulder actually touching my own we had listened to Brahms and Beethoven and watched Sergiu Celibidache, then new to the English scene, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

The perfect subject.

I wrote it and put it in the company Internal Mail box. Eventually came the request for my presence in the Editor’s office.

I went for the interview. The Editor took me into the big, well-lit room with eight desks and a swivel chair at each one. He pointed to the one I would occupy. I was introduced to the other authors. The next day I had a call from the Personnel Department. I had got the job. I told my girlfriend and was rewarded with the sort of smile that had attracted me from the start.

On the first day I swivelled in my leather-seated, sprung-back swivel armchair and enjoyed the camaraderie of the other people around me. The weeks passed. Laughs became a part of labour; muttered expletives at mistakes found in proofs, phones thrown back on to their cradles in exasperation, the door banging open to admit a late arrival - any of these would raise a crack from someone and a round of pleasantries. Happy people, clever people. I wondered if I had landed in dangerous territory; it was unlike anything I had experienced. But I began enjoying myself and finding that what I wrote did actually turn into print, sketches I did for designers and photographers did actually end up as professional illustrations.

And my father gave me a beautiful leather briefcase with my initials embossed below the brass lock.

A long, straight road

Monday, 4 January, 2010

I once broke five RAF laws in five minutes. And got away with it.

You won’t remember, but last July I told you how, one New Year’s Eve, I found myself at dead of night on a very long and very straight road, walking from Chowringhee in Calcutta (Kolkata) and hoping for someone to stop and tell me where I was supposed to be going. An American Air Force jeep-driver did exactly that and all was well.

During the next few weeks I took matters into my own hands and, for fun and in the absence of having any work to do (my visit was a temporary measure, being on my way back to a posting in England), taught myself to drive. This was a haphazard affair concerned chiefly with a friend getting hold of the keys for a dump-truck and me driving it round and round a spare patch of ground. At tedious parties I find this is good for either filling awkward silences or, if necessary, creating them. On the first day I ran over a snake and, not surprisingly, killed it outright. The fact that I had actually aimed at it and that the dump truck was of the rear-wheel steering variety moved the friend who was advising me to tell me I had natural ability.

This was rash of him, because by the time I had passed a sort of test I was getting cocky. Cockier, that is. They put me on the driving rota and one morning I found myself climbing into a 3-ton Bedford truck. I managed to pull out of the yard without doing anything silly and gradually discovered which lever and switch did what. Within the week I was driving troops and machinery hither and thither to destinations in and around Calcutta. My cockiness was at its peak when a routine call came for me to pick up one of the Bedfords and take airmen on a ‘liberty run’ into the city.

I filled up, and the men got on board. There seemed to be a lot of them, but who was I to argue? I took off and, with the ten miles of dead straight Grand Trunk Road ahead and a lot of singing behind, I joined in and went faster. The windows were down and the effects were cooling.

Then in my mirror I saw an RAF Police jeep gaining on me and gonging.

I stopped. One of the red-capped men wandered round to the back of the truck and the other came up to my window. The conversation, with its obligatory police opening for these occasions, is inscribed on my memory.

‘O.K. Where’s the fire, Airman?’

‘Fire?’

‘You were travelling at sixty miles per hour.’ He made a note in his book of Charge Sheets. ‘You’re on a charge. Now, show me your twelve-fifty, Airman.’

My 1250 Identity Card was in the top pocket of my shirt, and my shirt was hanging over the back of a chair, and the chair was by then three miles behind me. In response, I possibly spread my hands.

‘You realise it is an offence to fail to carry your twelve-fifty at all times, Airman?’ He made a note. ‘You’re on another charge. Where is your twelve-fifty, Airman?’

I told him about the chair, and he noted it.

‘And where is your Unit, Airman?’

This I now knew to perfection and, proudly, told him. ‘325 Maintenance Unit, Bally.’

He held out his hand. ‘Your Journey Form, Airman.’

A Journey Form is the slip of paper given to a driver at the beginning of a trip, naming the home unit, destination, purpose of journey, the time and date of issue and the tachometer reading. It is signed by the NCO in charge of the unit. I remembered having it given to me when I collected the keys for the truck, but from then on my memory of it was the customary blank. I felt in my shorts pockets and looked all round the cab. No Journey Form. The fact was recorded.

‘OK. You’re on another charge, Airman.’ Then he looked pointedly at my bare chest. ‘It is also an offence to be improperly dressed on duty, Airman.’

To be properly dressed meant Air Ministry Issue clothes. When in public it was always wise to wear Air Ministry Issue clothes, or at least clothes that resembled them closely. But Air Ministry clothing was sturdy but uncomfortable. Shorts put one in mind of canvas. Socks were knee-length, woollen, dyed khaki and felt like blankets. Shoes were sensible black leather. Hats were hard sun helmets with a vent at the top, a bit like a recumbent breast with an inflated nipple. (In Burma we were given a refinement of this: a bush hat. Studying snapshots of the time I cannot decide which looked the more ridiculous.) After about six weeks in India your elders and betters advised you in matters of clothing and directed you to the dhurzi in the bazaar, who would run you up natty little numbers in cool cotton. On this morning I wore no hat, no shirt and no socks. Just a pair of shorts made by Ahmed’s Splendid Bespoke Tailors of Calcutta. I could understand the sergeant’s concern.

‘You’re on another charge, Airman.’

As he noted all this he was joined by his colleague who muttered a few words in his ear. There came a light in his eye. He must have felt he was approaching some kind of record.

‘Airman, my Corporal tells me you’re carrying fifty men in this vehicle. That is twenty men over the Air Ministry Regulations maximum quoted for this particular vehicle.’ (Don’t quote me on these statistics. The exact numbers escape me but these give you the general picture.) ‘So, another charge, Airman.’ He made a note on the Charge Sheet, which by now had reached Page Two, and took a final look round the cab. The two then moved away to talk privately.

He came back, put one foot up on the step and leaned in at the open window with the air of one who has a difficult subject to discuss and wishes for there to be no misunderstandings or hard feelings.

‘Now,’ he said, and actually smiling, ‘the thing is this. When I stopped you I was running my Corporal into the city. And,’ he looked at his watch, ‘I’ve got to get back to the Unit now, so -’

He paused, and scratched his chin in the manner of one who is waiting for some recognition of his likely intentions. In its absence he made up his mind, and winked.

‘Give him a lift, would you?’

My stare of pained disbelief must have impressed him. He looked at his corporal, his book of charge sheets and back at me. He shrugged, opened the book, tore out the two pages of charges he had just filled in and, with the carbon copies, tore them up, rolled them into a ball and threw them into the trees.

‘Now will you take him?’ he said.

I took him, and all fifty-two of us sang all the way to Chowringhee.