an innate inability to cope with mathematics the only disadvantage I laboured under at St Paul’s, and being a Scout made not the slightest difference, was that I had a curious sense of humour which meant that if anything came up in class with a suggestion of double entendre it caused me to dissolve into hysterics, for which I was punished, sometimes quite severely. In other words I had a dirty mind.
For instance, on one occasion, when we were reading Scott’s Marmion aloud, it became obvious to myself and everyone else in the classroom that by the working of some hideously unfair natural process of selection it would fall to me to read a completely unreadable part of the romance in Canto Two, entitled ‘The Convent’, which concerned the blind Bishop of Lindisfarne. And you could have heard a pin drop when I got to my feet.
‘No hand was moved, no word was said
Till thus the Abbot’s doom was given.
Raising his sightless balls to heaven …’
was all I could manage before going off into peals of mad laughter and to be beaten by John Bell, the High Master, a hedonist who showed in as marked a way as possible in the circumstances where his sympathies lay by beating me as hard as anyone else sent to him for punishment, and then giving me a shilling. I have never forgiven Scott.
* All sums of sterling have been converted from pounds, shillings and pence to their decimal equivalents and to American currency of the time.
* It was originally intended that the church should be built at the foot of the hill near the site of the present village. However, when work was begun on it, the plan was vetoed by a band of local fairies. As a practical expression of their objection whenever the walls reached a particular height they proceeded to knock them down and carry the stones up to the top of the hill where they rebuilt the walls, after which they danced round them in a ring. After this had happened three times, the workmen who had on each occasion been forced to demolish the walls, carry the stones back down the hill and then build them up again in the low ground, lost heart and decided to build the church where the fairies wanted it to be built. As a result of this wise decision there was much jubilation among the fairies and when the church was finally completed they held a great fête on top of the hill to celebrate their victory, the sounds of their revelry being audible at a considerable distance.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1936, my father took me away from school and put me into a large, West End advertising agency.
Two years later, on the day we lost the Cereal Account, I finally decided to go to sea.
‘You’ve ’ad it,’ said the Porter with gloomy relish as I clocked in a little after the appointed hour. I was not surprised. My father had known the Chairman, George Wurzel, in his earlier, more uncomplicated days and had placed me with him in the fond belief that the sooner I got down to learning business methods the better. By now they were beginning to feel that they might have been wrong. Wurzel’s had long held a similar opinion. Since I had ridden a bicycle into the office of Miss Phrygian, the secretary of the managing director, they had been more than cool. Julian Pringle, the most rebellious copywriter Wurzel’s ever had, bet me that I could not ride it round the entire building without dismounting. The coast had been clear, the numerous swing doors held open, and the bicycle, which was being sketched for the front page of the Daily Mail, borrowed from the Art Department.
I had started my uneasy career in the Checking Department at the age of sixteen. Miss Phrygian had escorted me there. On the way we passed the Porter’s cubby hole; inside, half a dozen evil-looking messenger boys were waiting to take blocks to Fleet Street. There were more seats than messenger boys and I found Miss Phrygian casting a speculative look at the empty places. For a moment I thought she was going to enlist me in their ranks, but she must have remembered my father’s insistence on the value of the business methods I was going to learn, and we passed on.
In the narrow, airless transepts of the Checking Department, where the electric lights burned permanently, I thumbed my way through the newspapers and periodicals of the world to make sure that our advertisements were appearing on schedule and the right way up, which they failed to do quite frequently in some of the more unsophisticated newspapers from rugged and distant parts of the globe. Some of the advertisements had to be cut out and pasted in a book. We always cut out Carter’s Little Liver Pills, but I never discovered the reason. Turning the pages of thousands of newspapers day after day, I accumulated knowledge of the most recondite subjects – croquet matches between missionaries in Basutoland, reports of conventions of undertakers at South Bend, Indiana, great exhibitions for tram ticket collectors in the Midlands – the world spread out before me.
When I was not speculating about what I read, I would fight with Stan, a great dark brute of a boy, one of the two assistants in the Department, to whom I had become quite attached. Both Stan and Les, the second assistant, called me ‘Noob’.
‘’Ere, Noob, what abaht a pummel?’ Stan would croak invitingly, and we would pummel one another until Miss Phrygian banged furiously on the frosted glass of her office door to stop the din.
From time to time we would be visited by the Contact Men who dealt personally with Wurzel’s clients and handled the advertising accounts. They would stand gingerly in our den and turn the pages of the glossy magazines with beautifully manicured fingers. They were all youngish, perfectly dressed in Hawes and Curtis suits, and they smelled of bay rum. The amorous complications of their private lives were hair-raising. One of them owned a Bentley. They all wore clove carnations every day except Saturdays when they were in tweeds and went to the ‘country’ around Sunningdale. I always felt a clod in their presence and for some time after their visits disinclined to pummel. More popular were the visits of the typists. Wurzel’s was run on pseudo-American lines and had a splendid collection. Two of the most popular were Lettice Rundle and Lilly Reidenfelt. Lilly was the more provocative of the two. It was generally conceded that Lettice was the sort of girl you married and had children by after trying Miss Reidenfelt, who was expected to run to fat.
When Miss Reidenfelt entered the Checking Department, Stan, the Man of Action, would be stricken dumb and with eyes cast down would trace bashful circles amongst the waste paper with his toe. Les, Socialite and Dreamer, knew better how to please, and, more forthcoming, usually succeeded in pinching her. At such times what little air there was would be so heavy with lust that I would develop an enormous headache of the kind usually brought on by thundery weather. When Miss Reidenfelt had finally minced away inviolate, Stan would fling himself at the piles of newspaper in the steel fixtures and punch them in torment, crying: ‘Oh, you lovely bit of gravy.’
With such experiences behind me it was easy to believe the Porter when he said I was going to be sacked, and when I went into the main office through the swing doors in the reception counter I was filled with strangely pleasant forebodings. By this time the place would normally have been a Babel, but this morning the atmosphere was chilly, tragic, and unnaturally quiet. Lettice Rundle was having a good cry over her Remington and the group of young men who handled the Cereal Account were shovelling piles of proofs and stereos into a dustbin and removing their personal belongings from drawers. Years later I was to witness similar scenes in Cairo when Middle East headquarters became a great funeral pyre of burning documents as the Germans moved towards the Delta. But this was my first experience of an evacuation.
It was easy to see that besides myself quite a number of people were about to leave. Those remaining pored over their tasks with unnatural solicitude
