in neat columns on the backs of envelopes, of which he had an inexhaustible supply, which bore the letter heading of the Hotel Lotti in Paris.
This collection was one of his few legacies to me. The envelopes give the beginning of the joke, some of the attendant circumstances but nothing that would make it possible to deduce the joke itself. ‘Three men in a Turkish Bath – One Fat – It’s Pancake Day.’ Even now no one knows what was intended. To future generations they will prove as tantalising as the Rosetta Stone once was.
But not so tantalising as the visiting card which reads: Thos. W. Bowler (and an address at Walton-on-Thames) and on which my father had written in pencil in his neat handwriting ‘Met on train. Originator of the Bowler Hat?’
Another legacy was a set of dumb bells, weights and chest-expanders. At one time in the Nineties my father had been a pupil of Eugene Sandow, the strongest man in the world, who had opened a school of physical culture in the Tottenham Court Road. Sandow really was immensely strong. Eventually, at a time when motor cars were extremely heavy, he destroyed himself by lifting his own motor car out of a ditch into which he had accidentally driven it.
My father’s capabilities at the beginning and end of the course were embalmed in a small, morocco bound volume. Records of Development, Etc., Obtained During Three Months’ Course at Sandow’s Residential School of Physical Culture. Although the units of measurement employed are not recorded, the numerical increases are so impressive that it seems certain that my father must have graduated with honours.
| Harness Lift: | 200 | After Three Months: | 800 |
| Double-handed Bar-Bell Press: | 80 | After Three Months: | 120 |
| Arms: | 20 | After Three Months: (Can this be length?) | 30 |
| Wrist Exerciser: | 3 | After Three Months: | 8 |
What would he have emerged like if he had been a ‘resident pupil’?
All these instruments were made from a rustless, golden-coloured metal. The dumb bells were so heavy that when I inherited them after his death I found that I was unable to lift them in the manner prescribed by the instruction book. The compression and expansion of the springed instruments was also beyond me. This in spite of having myself been prepared for the business of being an ‘all-rounder’. Long before the age when English boys are subjected to this kind of treatment I was made to have cold baths and taken for what my father described as a ‘jog-trot’ along the towing path from Hammersmith to Putney and back early in the morning when no sane person was about. Sometimes for a change we would punt a football down deserted suburban streets, ‘passing’ to one another. As a result I too acquired a strong constitution but the outcome was not what my father intended. I secretly resolved that I would not be good at games and I have managed to keep this promise ever since.
Since no news had been received from the Adjutant about my future employment, within a week after my visit to Throttle and Fumble I was forced, with the utmost reluctance, to report for duty at Great Marlborough Street where, in the phrase that my parents were to employ with varying degrees of optimism in the succeeding months, I was to ‘learn the business’.
‘It’s only a temporary measure,’ they said, ‘until you find your feet.’ They had a touching and totally unfounded belief that I was destined for better things. It was a temporary measure that was to last ten years.
As I pushed open the front door which was ornamented with a large knocker in the form of a ram’s head, a little bell made a pinging noise. This I learned later warned the occupants of the Counting House, who also performed the functions of what would now be called ‘The Reception’, that a visitor was on the way in. Before the war the staff had always used the side entrance, a nearly vertical flight of wooden steps which led to the cellars, when entering or leaving the building, but by 1946 such nuances of behaviour had ceased to be observed. As a result the Counting House was perpetually on the qui-vive – more often than not for no good reason at all. The cause of the bell ringing was most probably a junior from the workroom on the way out to expend one of her meagre supply of sweet coupons on a Mars Bar for the tea break.
I went in and as the door closed behind me the sounds of traffic died away; the blasphemies of two vanmen who were unloading bolts of cloth from a pantechnicon and sliding them down a shiny plank into the bowels of the building faded; and I found myself in another, more tranquil world, almost in another century.
The hall in which I stood had white panelling; the floor ran first downhill, then uphill, creating the impression that one was intoxicated. To the left was a magnificently carved staircase which led by easy stages to the upper floors. The house had been built in the first half of the eighteenth century. It had been occupied by the actress Sarah Siddons and subsequently by that sinister personality Thomas Wainewright who was not only art critic, forger of bonds and wholesale poisoner but one of the foremost exponents of erotic drawing of his day, an art that he practised with such derivative skill that his work is usually attributed to his contemporary, Henry Fuseli, Keeper of the Royal Academy, whose technique was superior and whose imagination was even more perverse. On one of the upper floors there had continued to exist, until fire put paid to it in 1944, a small stage on which the famous actress had entertained her friends. With these two colossal personalities as previous tenants it was not surprising that the house had its own peculiar atmosphere.
My thoughts were brought back rudely to the present by the sounds of a telephone conversation that was taking place inside a minute booth under the staircase, so small that the unfortunate occupant had to choose between having a private conversation and asphyxiating in the process, or leaving the door ajar and delighting the staff of the Counting House as they pored over their ledgers.
Whoever was inside at this comparatively early hour had chosen the way of dishonour rather than death and was already engaged in an exchange of hideous confidences.
‘No, Maureen! … No, dear!’ said the disembodied voice. ‘No, I don’t want to! … No … No … No, I don’t mind that. I think he’s ever such a nice colour … sort of bronze … I just don’t like the way he … Well, he said that the last time … No! … No! The other one’s worse than he is … I had to have it cleaned – And my leg it was all bruised. Mum was ever so cross!’
As I listened fascinated to this recital a long, silky-looking leg slid sinuously round the door. Nylons were still in their infancy in Britain at that time or, in the jargon of the day, ‘in short supply’. The owner of this leg had obviously overcome these difficulties. Attached to it was a foot wanton enough, as Balzac wrote, to damn an archangel, partially enclosed in a sandal with a four-inch heel. Half-mesmerised, as a snake charmer who has allowed one of his charges to gain control of the situation, I watched the leg in which muscles rippled as sleek and powerful as a boa-constrictor’s. I could see nothing wrong with it. Either this was not the one that was ‘all bruised’ or else the scars of battle had already healed. I began to experience that morbid sensation known to psychoanalyists as The Death Wish. For the moment I could think of nothing more delectable than being crushed to pulp by this and its attendant member.
Now the instep began to arch itself with infinite slowness, just like the head of a cobra when it is about to strike
