Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier Page 8

  We stumbled on to the uneven pavings of the pedestrianized shopping street. It was low-rise, lightly populated with shoppers – ill-dressed, ill-favoured and undersized.

  I do not doubt that most of the citizens of the University City of Lancaster wear only the latest fashions, are beautiful, and indeed tall and well muscled, and I was unfortunate in my timing this Tuesday morning, but I have to tell as I found.

  Watch out, steer to port – here is a big chap – a policeman or security man, technicolor tattooed with jaundice-yellow patches and threatening slogans. Monica and I are tattooed as well but we are arteests and adventurers and my tattoo is very discreet. I know Monica’s isn’t but Monica is not twenty stone with a shaved head and a baton.

  I’ll drop into Wilkinson’s the ironmonger, get an Allen key,19 tighten up that handle.

  Coming out of Liverpool the throttle handle had come off in my hand. You don’t half feel a fool taking a narrowboat across a dock with your mate in a following boat and you realize your throttle bone is no longer connected to your engine bone.

  Two minutes, I said.

  Wilkinson’s had been redesigned as a haunted house – one of those with corridors that keep turning back on themselves. It seemed to sell cheap things, like a discount store – dusters and rolls of paper and crisps. After twenty minutes I found someone who looked like she worked there and she told me to look upstairs. After another twenty minutes I found the stairs and near the top there was my Allen key – in fact a packet of six all different sizes with little rings to hang them up – only 95p the lot.

  When I came out I pointed out the little rings to Monica and she was about to tell me what she thought of my little rings when a wheelchair came past and an old gent tipped out on to the pavement.

  We picked him up and settled him and Monica was raising the topic of my little rings again as another gent, formally dressed in a black suit, fell headlong a few yards ahead on our left. They were going down like ninepins in Lancaster.

  A bulky lad who looked like a farmer stopped us and spoke for some time. I’m sorry, I said, I don’t understand – I come from another part of the country.

  He explained again slowly that at home he had a dog of whom he was very fond – a long dog, which is a type of lurcher. He had spotted Jess and he had decided she would be a suitable mother for his dog’s puppies, and he wondered if we all might enter into the necessary arrangements. I explained that alas Jess was no longer active in the reproduction department but how nice of him. It would have been lovely, he said, and Jim and Jess tried to climb up inside his jacket.

  Back at the boat a short chap about fifty with a round face. Hello, I am Norman – that is my boat next door. Permission to step on your gunwale, captain? They tell me you are a writer.

  Yes, I said.

  This is my friend Arthur.

  Permission to step on your gunwale, captain? asked Arthur. He was slim and tanned, about the same age as Norman, with no teeth. They both shook my hand. They smelt of drink.

  We have a plan – what with you being a writer, said Norman.

  Oh yes?

  I will tell you our plan, in complete confidence of course. We have been working it out for some time.

  He dropped his voice and they both leaned in towards me. Our plan is to fit my boat out to go to sea and go out from West Kirby. We expect to make a lot of money.

  How?

  Ah, that’s what you tell us – you are the writer.

  Monica and I sat down to lunch and there was shouting. Norman and Arthur were quarrelling on the towpath with three other men. They all began to exchange blows and Arthur fell down outside our galley window, crying out, his face streaming with blood. The group moved away down the towpath, Arthur complaining and the others arguing and trying to clean him up.

  In the afternoon Norman’s boat slipped away and a new neighbour arrived in a fifty-eight-footer.

  At four o’clock the next morning our new neighbours began to shout at each other. We lay uneasy in the basin of the University City, under the glowering apartments, until the tumult had died.

  By my troth, quoth Lancelot, this is a dreadful place.

  * * *

  In a nook20

  That opened south,

  You and I

  Lay mouth to mouth.

  A snowy gull

  And sooty daw

  Came and looked

  With many a caw;

  ‘Such,’ I said

  ‘Are I and you,

  When you’ve kissed me

  Black and blue!’

  I don’t know if you are familiar with the place where the Ross Spur passes the Wye – the river in its green valley, going south for Monmouth and the Bristol Channel. On its bank our main characters in their youth – Terry, twenty-three, and Monica, twenty-two. Monica had just put on her swimming costume, managing to preserve her modesty while holding my interest without difficulty.

  This girl was gorgeous – pale skin, green eyes, dark hair, brilliantly clever. This was the best girl ever. I had been so lucky to crash that Cardiff University hop just when her immature thirty-year-old boyfriend had decided he couldn’t commit. Bastard, hurting my Mon. And she’s coming up to London so I can see her there. Shall I explain some more about Charles Baudelaire21 or give her another kiss? Tough choice that one.

  Tell you what, I said later. Let’s take this mattress and sail on it down the river.

  OK said Monica.

  I pulled the inflatable down the bank through the soft grass and settled it in the shallows. My new girl, my special new girl, and I rolled on to it and it bumped away and put on some speed and we sailed laughing the length of a couple of cricket pitches, and on to London and Canada and Stone and Carcassonne and out on to the Gulf of Mexico.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE LANCASTER CANAL

  Further North You Cannot Go

  Ghosts on the sand, lying drenched and still

  He was a real trainee – A loser all my life – A Bolton parson telephoned me recently – Now I’m engaged to Miss Monica Ann Gell – We would have to ask the Archbishop of Canterbury – Love before dinner – Fresh green and yellow summer skins – Do you do much ocean racing, Terry? – The tide was gathering speed – It looks like a cowpat – The jewel of the north-west coast – Like being at sea

  DECENT CHAPS FROM Oxford went into the universities or the BBC or the law or medicine or the Civil Service. They did not make money from society – they served society. But I wanted experience of the real world so that when I became a famous poet I could offer more understanding of life. And I knew I had some growing up to do – perhaps business life would toughen me up.

  Unilever sent me to Lever Brothers, which with the US firm Procter & Gamble dominated the UK market for soap.

  Management studies had not yet arrived from the USA so Unilever management trainees hung around their betters in offices and factories, hoping to pick up something or other that would illuminate their later years. I spent a morning with a guy in Port Sunlight who explained the system they had developed for keeping track of ladders.

  Trainees were tolerated rather than welcomed, because they did not stay long and one day they were going to get all the best jobs. They were exotics – there were very few university graduates around and fewer had been to Oxbridge – What do you read, Mr Darlington?

  I did not meet the expectations of all who met me. The head secretary in the north-east office made her opinion known –

  Now that trainee we had before Mr Darlington – he wore tweed suits and had a lovely sports car and a really posh accent. One day he came into the office with a pheasant hanging out of his pocket. I would drop my drawers for him any time. He was a real trainee.

  The main rule for a trainee was not to get sent out on the road. The road meant the regional sales offices, small and inbred, where no one was promoted. It was vital to get back into head office, among the influence, the jobs, the money.

  After three months
it was time for my interview with the board. I was clear on my strategy.

  I would like to go out on the road, I said. I want to feel the wind in my hair, the sand between my toes. My constituency is the common people. I will absorb the wisdom of the grocers our customers and win the trust of the humble sales representatives. The real Lever Brothers, its heart, is out there on the road. What are we, if we cannot give to ordinary people …

  Just a minute, Mr Darlington, said the Chairman.

  He looked around his colleagues.

  Terry, we have never heard a trainee talk like this before. It’s people like you we need in head office.

  There was not much to eat or drink in the war and in the fifties the business community was jolly well going to make up for it. Well into the thirty-year post-war boom our time had come. Drunk at lunchtime, drunk after work, three-hour lunches, best restaurants, damn the expense. You could entertain practically anybody and charge it against tax. If you ate in, Levers had four levels of canteen, and at the higher levels the lunches got longer and drunker.

  With two dominant firms in the soap industry it was easy to fix prices and with the high margins you could have dozens, hundreds, of people hanging around, circling each other.

  The smylere with the knyf1 under the cloke

  I would try to write my Punch articles on the train, when I was not too crushed or frozen and the railways were not on strike. The offices in Lever House were noisy as London rebuilt itself outside the window and the meetings were interminable. No one took any responsibility for anything.

  While meeting in the sales office2 this morning

  To discuss the allocations of bargain packs in Scotland

  It occurred to me

  That the waves seethe along the rocks in Barafundle

  And the sea lies in the bay’s hand like a green stone

  But if I leave now I’m a loser, I said to Monica, and I’ll be a loser all my life.

  My first real management job was as a liaison manager with the Port Sunlight factory and the research establishments. This meant working with boffins – scientists and development engineers.

  The perfumiers were the best.

  These guys were arteests. They wore bow ties. They would work at an organ, yes an organ. They each had a big desk with hundreds of little bottles on it. On the left the little bottles contained the low notes, the heavy smells of musk and ambergris, and on the right the high notes – the light florals and so on. They would dip a little paper taper into a bottle and then another taper into another bottle and build up a perfume. A perfume had to have a bass, like music, and a middle range and high notes.

  Then there were the development engineers. Tweed sports coats, serious expressions, like Michael Redgrave in The Dam Busters.3 They would stare at their new machine, which was usually called a Pilot Plant and never seemed to work, and hit it hard with the heel of the hand in the top right-hand corner. If this didn’t work they would kick it with their left foot. Sometimes this would do the trick, but often the machine would make a grinding noise and burst into flame –

  Gentlemen, the Board is most concerned4 that recently

  Due to bad planning in the factory

  A number of matters have been going awry

  You may have read the harrowing obituary

  Of the Foreman working late to ensure delivery

  Who slipped and was boiled up in the soapery

  In Foods Division because of some uncertainty

  Blue baked beans were manufactured in huge quantity

  And puzzled letters are still arriving hourly

  A Bolton parson telephoned me recently

  To remark that in a pack of Indian tea

  His wife had found an operative’s glass eye

  A line of costly packaging machinery

  Driven far beyond its nominal capacity

  Broke out and packed three passers-by from Wallasey

  I hope all management will now try seriously

  To plan ahead and work efficiently

  You can go now No smoking in the lavatory

  When I had finished my term in this job many of the scientists wrote nice letters and wished me luck and sent copies to my boss. They realized that I was really interested in their machines and tests and formulations. Their letters did much for my reputation and I was appointed Senior Brand Manager in charge of Lux, Unilever’s biggest toilet soap.

  Now don’t forget – if it doesn’t work, follow the professionals – hit it in the top right-hand corner with the heel of the hand.

  It started with a badger.

  Herbert from J. Walter Thompson was telling us about India in the war. It seems his colonel fell in love with an Indian boy. One night there was a great cry and the colonel rushed from his tent, gravely wounded in the personal department. The doctor was called for and the colonel explained that a badger had crept into his tent and bitten him.

  It’s not funny I know and we should be ashamed, but we laughed and laughed and tucked into the oriental food, which seemed to be mincemeat and spices in oil.

  That night I awoke with a terrible pain in my stomach. I crawled out into the night and knocked up the doctor round the corner, who gave me two aspirins. I packed to go to hospital, but they sent me home from the outpatients.

  The pain came and went over two months, and I lost two stone. The local doctors of Barons Court were unhelpful – Who is this guy in a posh suit? Finally I went home to Cardiff and saw the family doctor. He sent me to a surgeon who said I had a gall bladder that was giving me colic and I had better have it out.

  I went to a small private hospital in Llandaff.

  I woke up with a six-inch wound in my belly and had to get through the night in agony – the worst time I have ever had. It still hurts when I think of it. I rang for the nurse and a teenager gave me two aspirins. I read since of a doctor who had the same experience and devoted his life to promoting pain control. I hope he had every success.

  I was blessed with many visitors. My father loved Monica, and brought her along, bending the rules on visitor numbers by explaining that she was my fiancée. She wore a hat and looked adorable.

  My trouble was that I was finding it very difficult to commit. Monica was my best girl of course – she would be anybody’s best girl – and I had cast aside all others, but I had been so much hurt by my first love for the girl next door that I just could not open my heart, if you will forgive the sentimental fifties way of putting it.

  These days they take your gall bladder out through your earhole and you are better in a fortnight but I was home in Cardiff for three months. I had time to think. And I had been so knocked about by the pain in hospital it had changed me.

  When I came back to London I went straight to Monica’s flat and went down on my knee and now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,5 I mean Miss Monica Ann Gell.

  You don’t have to feel worried or ashamed by your feelings of sexual desire, said the chaplain. God put them there for a reason.

  Oh good, I said.

  The Jesus College chaplain looked very frail. I felt that any feelings of sexual desire would have shattered him into pieces. But he had three kids fair play so perhaps he was a bedroom athlete, who would leap out of his cassock and take up the merry chase before the chords of evensong had died away.

  The college chapel is not licensed for marriage, continued the chaplain. We would have to ask the Archbishop of Canterbury for a special dispensation and he’s expensive and takes some time. Your best plan is to get married in a register office and come along the next day and have a service here.

  I don’t know if this matters, Chaplain, but I am getting married in my own clothes.

  In your own clothes? You are getting married in a lounge suit?

  The chaplain looked as if I had insisted on wearing a gun-belt. Letting these lower-middle-class people into Oxford might be a good idea in principle but people like him had to sort out the problems that arose in the front line.

&
nbsp; It’s very unusual. I’m not sure … I’ll tell you what – your wife can wear a short dress, and then it would probably be all right.

  Looks like we are going to make it, I said to Monica before the big day. The bursar nearly turned nasty about the punchbowl but as long as the chaplain does not break his leg you and I are going to be joined in jolly matrimony on Saturday.

  It was a vicious cold dark day. Nearly everyone made it through the snow and Cousin Ken played upon the organ in the chapel. Monica looked enchanting in the short velvet dress that she had made herself and I was in my black Simpson’s suit, looking striped and convincing and in my early fifties. As we kneeled we had an excellent view of the chaplain’s broken leg, his plaster covered by a green sock.

  In the hall we filled the college punchbowl with mulled wine, and when our guests had emptied it we fled into the West Country in a Mini, which handles pretty well in the snow.

  Bath, Salisbury, Henley, exploring the potential of love before dinner. As we had been the last couple in Europe not to sleep together before we married this was extra good fun.

  Our little flat was on a shopping parade in Chessington, Surrey. Monica was looking forward to returning to her job at Tiffin Girls’ School – no longer little Miss Gell but married Mrs Darlington.

  I don’t know what got us interested in the idea of a canal holiday. There were few canals in South Wales and I couldn’t remember visiting one, apart from the dykes in Lincolnshire in my babyhood. But it seemed a good idea to go on a canal holiday this year.

  In the early sixties the only canal voyage known was Llangollen and back, and we went to Market Drayton to hire a boat. By the quay a few plastic cruisers swayed in the wind. One was green, and looked neater than the others. It had a little outboard engine.

  The boat was small enough to do circles in the cut and when Monica drove it did circles all the time. Also Monica was pregnant with our first baby and the locks were heavy. So we divided the work – I drove the boat and did the locks and Monica heated the baked beans on the gas ring.

  The Shropshire Union Canal north of Market Drayton is ravishing. There were a few cruisers like ourselves. Every ten yards there would be a plop and a line of bubbles and a water vole would make his getaway.