Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Read online

  Of course Charlie knows I went to Oxford. Of course Charlie knows we are doing well and any dominance has been reversed but he does not want to discuss it and I know that he is deeply sorry we looked him up and he will never want to see or hear from us again.

  I have been spared much in life – despite driving sports cars for forty years, sometimes at great speed, God forgive me I have not had a serious motor accident. My children grew up healthy and I have been able to pay my bills. My wife is wonderful and my illnesses have gone away except for the shingles and this will go one day.

  My griefs have mainly been related to the loss of friends who have decided that they want no more of me. My childhood friends like Charlie and my best friends from Oxford cut the ties that bound us and it hurts like hell.

  My fault was to keep growing, keep changing, to reverse the dominance, buy a big house.

  It was a funny empty time after I retired and before I took up writing. I would walk with Jim and sort and weed my private papers so things were tidy when I died.

  My father had left a number of small diaries filled with the day-to-day news of the last fifteen years of his life. There was not much news – Got up, went for a walk, put in a row of marigolds, went for a walk, went to church. And there was a chest full of photographs of the thirties, pictures of my dad in India and the lovely young couples who were my relations long ago.

  There was one big picture of an Indian lady.

  One day my father said Son you are fifty now and I feel I can talk frankly to you about sexual matters. I shall tell you something about my time in India, as a young airman.

  Dad’s mother was part Burmese – that was one reason why he was so handsome, and he sunburned very brown. In Karachi he would dress as a local and go out into the bazaars.

  One day, he said, I met a lady. An Indian lady. I was twenty-two and she was twenty-nine. She was married but could not have any children. It was great for some time and then it was time for me to go home. Unfortunately as I thought at the time, I missed the train on Karachi station. But it was a bit of luck in fact as her husband was waiting for me on the platform with a revolver. If I had been in time for that train I would probably not be here and neither would you.

  After Dad died I mentioned the lady to my mother. I think Dad had a girl in India before he came back and married you.

  I knew nothing of her – if I had I would never have married him.

  But she knew damn well – I marvelled at the way her generation could hold on to two realities at once. Many an illegitimate child was accepted into a family and everyone knew but no one knew. Where there is no money around you just have to get on with it.

  I put all the photos back in the chest.

  My next retirement project was to grow a ponytail, just like Willie Nelson.11

  Willie Nelson looks great in a ponytail but he has a neat and narrow head and I don’t. As my hair grew over my collar I just looked degenerate. I was in the Star one day when Maurice Hamer the publican God rest him said Terry I don’t want you to take offence but although I am proud to count you among my friends I may not be talking with you much in future – if I am seen talking to a tramp it might encourage low trade to come into my pub.

  So I wandered round Stone with Jim, an old man with nothing to do, a vagrant and a threat. Sometimes I would drop into the pub and talk to the old chaps and it could be good but all too often it would get awkward because I lived in The Radfords and had big cars and in their terms I was rich and how could I ever fit into their groups, their hierarchies?

  Along the towpath – My God they are pulling down the Rising Sun! They can’t pull down the Rising Sun! Piles of bricks and rubbish! You are pulling down my town, my memories. This is the pub opposite the Stone Master Marathoners’ clubhouse! What is going on? And what is that on that pile of rubbish? It’s the sign – the lovely swinging sign of the sun rising over the canal – two oil paintings back to back!

  I found the dominant male, the owner – It had to go, he said, losing money.

  Look, can I have this sign? I think you were throwing it out. I don’t have any money on me but I can go home and get some.

  Just give me what you have in your pocket.

  I had seventy-five pence.

  I carried the sign over to the clubhouse. Monica was inside with her middle-class friends playing bridge. I propped the sign against our camper-van and went in.

  I walked up the stairs to the room where fifty people were arranged at tables being dummies or redoubling their spades or winking or pressing each other’s feet under the table or whatever they do in bridge clubs.

  I went in, my grey hair sticking out under my cap, my coat covered in dust and rubble. The room fell silent. Somebody said Can we help you?

  I saw Monica in the far corner. There was a sign, I shouted, I saw a sign, I saw a sign!

  * * *

  When Jess was injured we boated on for a few miles and tied up in a little marina on the outskirts of Dewsbury, not far from the vet.

  Bandit country, said one of my friends in an email, but it suited us fine. A pub, a canalside walk. A lot of tattoos, but we have tattoos ourselves.

  Each evening for three weeks we would leave Jim in the boat and walk to the vet. The nurse brought Jess out to a little room where we would all lie on the floor and she would crawl over us and lick us. Her leg was heavily bandaged – a different colour each day. When first we visited she was very quiet and then she started to get more cheerful. We would bring her some Spam Lite. I think she looked forward to the visits and they made it easier for her.

  On the way home we would pass through a part of the town where there were many families from Pakistan. One evening there seemed to be a party somewhere because there were a lot of young girls in pyjamas in vibrating green or pink walking along in the sun.

  Monica liked to call at the supermarket, where there were racks of vegetables we had not seen before and shelves of curry sauces. One day I went along the vegetables and picked out those that we did not know – mainly things that looked like small cucumbers. We took them home and Monica cooked them and they were awful.

  But Monica made a curry with vegetables we knew and it was smashing and we have it every week now.

  The gentleman behind the till was dressed like a bandit chief in an old film. He had a menacing face and a grey beard and a turban and probably a scimitar under his robe. He fancied Monica rotten and would smile and smile for her and make jokes which we did not understand and then he would smile some more and I think he let her have one or two of the little cucumbers on the house.

  Off down the towpath with Jim.

  A freckled boy on a bike. Are you digging for worms?

  No, the trowel is to clean up after my dog.

  Cute dog – a greyhound?

  No, a whippet – they are smaller. School is over today?

  I don’t go – I’m seventeen tomorrow. I’m going for an interview about the army in September. Is that your boat? Very nice. I’ve been talking to the fishermen. I like fishing.

  What do you fish for?

  Jack Pike.

  What is a Jack Pike?

  A Jack Pike is a female Pike, and the male Pike are just Pike. Jack Pike are smaller.

  Oh. What are all those fish we have in the marina under our boat?

  They will be Rudd and Chubb and Tench and Bream and Roach. I catch Carp as well as Pike, usually under a boat. The bottom of your boat is growing plants and stuff and the fish eat it and when a new boat arrives the Carp say Great and hurry to get the new plants first. See the way the canal is moving now – very slowly that way? Eighty per cent of the fish always swim with the flow and 20 per cent against it Goodbye.

  Goodbye. Nice to meet you. Good luck in September.

  So 80 per cent of the fish always swim with the flow, and 20 per cent against it. Bit like people really.

  * * *

  After we retired we still lived in The Radfords and so did the business and we need
ed from time to time to escape. Stone is central to the UK waterway system and we set about getting to know the world of boating.

  We realized that buying a boat for leisure alone would be folly. We would have to live on a narrowboat for four months a year to get any value. That was fine by us.

  So there we are looking round marinas at boats. Dreadful boats full of plywood partitions, ugly boats, rather nice boats but rather expensive, and we came upon Sinnita. I shall not tell of her virtues, her sweeping shape, her open-plan layout, her windows each of which could hold a cloud. Or of her vices – the rubbish engine, the dead batteries. I try not to think of her too much as I get upset.

  I had just lost my beloved mother Phyllis May – my beloved father George Jubb had gone eight years before. The beautiful couple from Pembroke Dock were together again. I bet my mother is sending Dad up the highest crags in heaven to pick a spray of valerian. He was watching Peter Davison as Albert Campion in some detective story about a chalice, when death released him from it.

  We had a mooring at Hoo Mill nine miles south of Stone, where we could watch the sun set over the fields. We would sail to Brewood and back and up to Stone.

  Sunset with the fish rising, the swan looking into our bedroom window, cruising at night by our tunnel light, the snow muffling the morning on the Shropshire Union, new curtains of gypsy’s lace, the dance of the kingfishers, the goldfinches on a thistle, the perfumes of Arabia from the cut grass and the may, the waterbirds the waterfish the waterplants, the lilies and their yellow flags and the marigolds, the fruit on the bushes and trees.

  One day we were moored and I looked out of the window and cried out Mon, a fox!

  The fox came partially out of the bushes on the other side of the cut and I rushed for my camera. I won’t get him, I’ll miss him, it always happens.

  The fox revealed himself and walked about a little bit and I shot a roll of film. He sat back and waved his front legs in the air. I shot another roll. He rolled on his back and I rushed to my film drawer.

  Now the fox seemed to be doing some sort of tango – perhaps it is a mating dance, I thought.

  He was still there two hours later, grinning at me. My film drawer was empty.

  The dragon flicked out a black tongue so he could catch my smell before he attacked. He was ten feet long. These dragons, you know, do not run at you and nip your ankles like a dog – they get up on their back legs and hold out their arms and stare at you and give you the upright rush and overwhelm you and then chomp you.

  The guide explained that it was a long time since a Komodo dragon had eaten anyone. The last person had been a Swedish lecturer.

  When Monica and I handed over Research Associates we decided to have an expensive holiday, and among the more expensive available was a tour in a small cruise ship round Indonesia. Although I had knocked about a bit I was not quite sure where Indonesia was, or indeed what it was. It turned out to be a massive archipelago – a pattern of islands along the Equator, stretching east as far as you can go before you hit the Pacific.

  We sailed from Singapore. Not my kind of place really. If they catch you throwing away a gum wrapper they take away all your clothes and brand you on the bum and send you home in a tramp steamer. I don’t chew gum but there must have been many other things for which you get branded on the bum and I didn’t know what they were.

  The outdoor food market was superb, and we went to the Raffles Hotel. I love old hotels – they are often not the most expensive if you can put up with a bit of running down. My favourite was the Waldorf in London – tea dances in the Palm Court. Then the Pera Palace in Istanbul, the Château Frontenac in Quebec, the Adelphi in Liverpool, the Royal in Leamington Spa, the Paul Revere Motel in Boston (I’m joking).

  We don’t usually do what one is supposed to do but we had gin slings in the bar in the Raffles Hotel. Noël Coward did it or something. Then we had dinner. That was fine but the staff kept coming out of the kitchen and hiding behind pillars and looking at us and screaming behind their hands. Aren’t they used to English people here? It’s a famous international hotel, after all.

  We checked around to see if anything else was exercising them, and I checked my flies under the table, but all was well as they ran in and out of the kitchen and made moaning noises.

  They think you are James Bond, explained the waiter. You are going bald like Sean Connery and you are tall and you have a round face and the whiskers just like him.

  Well, tell them they all look the same to me too.

  The ship was smallish – none of your towering halls. It had been a factory boat for a fishing fleet before it was poshed up. We booked late and had the worst cabin – it had a porthole but it was small and most of the time there was an oriental gentleman under the bed groaning and knocking with his spanner at some piece of equipment that was central to our voyage.

  The ship set forth, our oriental friend still slaving under the bed, into the blue equatorial seas under a blasting sun, and soon we arrived at an island.

  The island was the size of a football field. The sand so white and the water so clear and the warm wind rolling the surf. It was more Eastmancolor than Technicolor – you remember, the film stock that made things look bluer than they were – and the projectionist had put in his brightest bulb.

  A hill with cliffs and about a hundred inhabitants lived in sheds below it. We moved among them as if they were animals in a zoo. One was a lad who wore a black leather jacket and held a guitar. He looked at us proudly – keen that we should notice him – the local rebel, the James Dean12 of his tiny island forty hours from land.

  In the afternoon an expedition set off from the ship in rubber boats to see whales and stuff and I said Bugger that and stayed on the ship and wandered round and dozed in the library. I was delighted when they all came back and said they had seen nothing. In the evening there was a long presentation by our expedition staff of the adventures we had had during the day, because we were not just a bunch of rich farts living high and patronizing the locals, we were intrepid – we went out in rubber boats!

  We saw many wonderful sights. Borobudur13 was a monument deep in the jungle showing the Buddha’s life in stone as you walked up and round it. It is up there with Stonehenge, St Paul’s, Paradise Lost.

  We saw the fruit bats flying out to sea on their leather wings to feed on far islands – a thousand thousand in the dusk throwing an early night over the ship. I thought of my very own fruit bat in London Zoo. Stone Master Marathoners paid for his keep and the zoo authorities put his name with ours on the plaque outside his aviary or battery. We called him Ernest. There were many fruit bats in the battery but you could tell Ernest the mascot of Stone Master Marathoners – he was the one with the biggest dick.

  We stood by the captain on the bridge as he came into harbour. The pilot didn’t speak English and that did not help and we were almost at the quay and the ship was not straight. The captain asked for a rope from the bow to that bollard on the shore and Spring her in! – that means rev up and put the tiller hard over and she will ease herself sideways until she is right. Exactly the manoeuvre that I had learned with the Phyllis May – we sailors have our tricks.

  Among the curiosities of our trip were the tour buses that took the intrepid travellers out to the tourist sites. The machines usually had air conditioning, though never enough. They went very fast on spent suspension, with the guide bellowing into a mike and speakers rebellowing back to our seats. The language used was unknown to science. After a while I realized it was supposed to be English.

  On the ship the voyagers were getting organized. As they were English they were doing this by dividing into social classes. In America they would have divided by money, in France by knowledge of food and wine, in Wales by artistic or sporting talent, but these were English so they divided by social class.

  First were the aristocracy. We didn’t have much aristocracy on the ship but we had a countess. She had a retinue including an assistant and one or two of
the highest among the passengers attended her, including the ex-head of the RAF and his wife. This party did not speak to anyone else, but once the intrepid birdman threw me a smile that was so warm and full of meaning that I blushed and turned away.

  Then the money. There were half a dozen guys who were obviously extremely rich. They didn’t go round saying Look I am extremely rich – you just knew it. The main indicator was their hundred-mile stares, as if they were on some drug that took them away to somewhere rather nice where You can’t come sorry. They all knew each other and knew all the other extremely rich people in the world, and didn’t speak to anyone else.

  The county set – the people who live near you but you never see because they go to different schools and belong to different clubs and speak loudly in a way ordinary people find difficult to understand. They live in those houses behind trees, on the edge of town. There are lots of them in Staffordshire, so my daughter Lucy tells me, because she has a county friend and goes to a dance at a private preparatory school once a year and says the county set are loud and a bit stupid and most of the ladies seem to have had cosmetic surgery. On the ship they stuck together on corner tables, shouting. They were not interested in anyone else.

  The business people. People who had made it with their own business to the extent they could afford to come on the voyage. I thought of this group as We. It was pointless trying to break into any other scene. I had learned at Oxford that the essence of the English class system is exclusion.

  The rest. Unclassifieds like the ship’s doctor, the lecturers, the shy chap on his own, the funny couple who kept trying to make friends but whom no one liked. There was a university professor whom we had to have surgically removed when we got to Bali. The expedition staff did not count as they were the serving class.