terribly funny. That’s a man’s soul informing his writing if ever anything was.
V: He would have written a great piece about his funeral. It was rich with potential catastrophe – if he’d been there to plan it, the worry would have killed him. But the various strange details all fell into place, and they were perfect. The Cricklewood churchyard that he loved because a ventriloquist is buried there with his puppet. And so is Marie Lloyd – we’ve got his piece about it somewhere in the 1990s section. The rabbi who didn’t mind coming to a churchyard – who advised us, in fact, to ‘drop this prayer, it’s a bit God-heavy’. The cantor who sang a mournful Hebrew song, and then came out to Sandi Toksvig. The moment when Uncle Andrew misread the map, looked in the wrong part of the cemetery and said: ‘We’ve got a disaster on our hands – they’ve forgotten to dig a hole.’ It was like an Alan Coren piece being acted out by accident. And it worked: it reflected everything. The sentimentality about Judaism with its gefilte fish balls and anxious tailors … and the sentimentality about England’s green slopes and church spires … with some lovable, fallible, funny human characters in the middle. If we’d only had an Austin Healy with a copy of Gatsby and a hamburger on the front seat, it would have ticked every box.
G: Speaking of ticking boxes, we still have to write the introduction.
V: We haven’t decided which one of us will type and which will pace …
G: We could just leave it as dialogue.
V: Mightn’t that look a bit lazy?
G: No, no, people will think it was our plan right from the beginning.
V: But then mightn’t it look a bit gimmicky?
G: And thus in some way unsuitable for the introduction to an anthology of writing by Alan Coren …?
V: True, true.
G: Remember the introduction he wrote to that anthology of humour in the ’80s? It looks like a piece of autobiography – except of course it’s all nonsense, not autobiographical at all.
V: And yet at the same time, in a way, it is. Okay, it’s a daft story about a man who dreams of compiling anthologies of Boer operetta lyrics. And who has a preposterous soldier father with a giant tattooed arm. But the basic narrative … a young man who yearns to get into publishing … whose physical, practical, sceptical father thinks he won’t make money from it … the son pressing on regardless, travelling abroad … returning to England at twenty-two, publishing his books and working on a humorous magazine … It is actually Daddy’s mini-life story, but with everything transformed into cartoon, like the farm hands becoming scarecrows in The Wizard Of Oz.
G: Do you think perhaps you’re over-reading it?
V: That was a short story which he thought counted as an ‘introduction’ – but at least he wrote it out in paragraphs.
G: We could call ours a ‘foreword’.
V: Fine. Dialogue it is, and a foreword it shall be.
G: It’s not as if people have forked out Twenty-pounds to read a piece by us anyway, is it? It’s him they want to read.
The introduction to an anthology of modern humour, by Alan Coren (1982)
Nobody who met my old man ever forgot him. The first thing you saw was the sabre scar across his head. The wound had been stitched up by a chanteuse who went in with the first ENSA wave at Salerno, and the only way she could work the needle without passing out was to stay drunk.
His left arm was the size of anyone else’s thigh, and it was tattooed in the shape of a cabriole leg. One of his favourite party pieces was where he went out of the room and came back a couple of minutes later as a Regency card table. People still talk about that. His right arm stopped at the elbow: the rest had been left inside the turret of a Tiger tank after the lid came down, somewhere in the Ardennes Forest.
When he came back from the War, he just laughed about it, at first. But then, one night in the winter of 1945, he suddenly said:
‘You’re going to have to help me at the brewery, son.’
I said: ‘I’m only seven, Dad.’
It was the first and only time my old man hit me. If he had hit me with the left, I should not be here now; but it was the right he threw, and being short it had neither the range nor the trajectory, but it hurt just the same when the elbow connected.
Later on, he quietened down and asked me what I intended to do with my life if I didn’t want to hump barrels.
‘I want to do anthologies, Dad,’ I said.
He looked at me hard, with his good eye; the other one is still rolling around near El Alamein, for all I know.
‘What kind of job is that for a man?’ he said.
‘I don’t think I’m cut out for humping barrels, Dad,’ I said.
He spread his arms wide; or, more accurately, one wide, one narrow.
‘It doesn’t have to be barrels. There’ll be other wars, you could go and leave limbs about.’
I nodded.
‘I thought about that, Dad. I could be a war anthologiser. A war provides wonderful opportunities, collected verses, collected letters, collected journalism, things called A Soldier’s Garland with little bits of Shakespeare in. Did you know that Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” has appeared in no less than one hundred and thirty-eight anthologies, Dad, nearly as often as James Thurber’s “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty”?’
He thought about this for a while.
‘Is there money in it?’ he said at last.
‘Dear old Dad!’ I said. ‘An anthologiser doesn’t think about money. He is pursued by a dream. He dreams of making a major contribution to gumming things together. He dreams of becoming a great literary figure like Palgrave or Quiller-Couch.’
‘And how do you go about learning to anthologise, son?’
I smiled, but tolerantly.
‘You can’t learn it, Dad. It comes from the heart and the soul. Fifty-pounds would help.’
People have asked me, three decades on, in colour supplements, on chat shows, what the major influence on my work has been. I tell them that it wasn’t Frank Muir, it wasn’t Philip Larkin, it wasn’t even Nigel Rees or Gyles Brandreth, important though these have undeniably been: it was the day my old man took his last Fifty-pounds
