Seventeen

After the Citroen was sold I was walking everywhere, which had its pluses. I tell you, I was probably the fittest failed novelist, certainly in Reigate, possibly in Surrey, and I might just have taken the accolade for the whole South East. I hoped so. I so wanted to be good at something.
The dogs were dogs and so were blissfully unaware of the gathering storm. I never skimped on their food. How could you? They were so big they’d have eaten me if I hadn’t given them two big bowls of dog-scoff a day.
We didn’t go to the woods in Dorking anymore, it was too far to walk and I didn’t fancy taking them on the bus. Mitchell would have tried to take control and would certainly have bitten the bus driver’s ear. A bus in a ditch complete with passengers was not something I wanted to contemplate. Besides, I don’t think they would have liked the dog smell that would have begun to invade the local buses. Surely there would have been a petition raised, or calls in the local council for a complete dog ban.
So, it was off to Reigate Park every day, which was not bad. At least it gave me a chance to pick mushrooms, and in the summer I picked some blackberries, took them home and made, well, blackberries in a bowl. Very tasty.
Once I went three days without eating a thing. Really. Not a morsel. Even the dogs’ food began to look appetising. One thing a lack of food does is sharpen your mind. Sometimes though I felt there was just too much clarity for my liking.
I was still managing to get some dribbles of work and I’d started on a second novel. Okay, the first hadn’t got anywhere but the second surely would. It had to.
Well...it didn’t. In fact it was received even more negatively than the first. At least with the first one a publisher did want to publish it. It wasn’t my lucky decade though - they were bought by a big US publisher who decided to can horror and concentrate on romantic bonkbusters instead. I feverishly tried to rewrite the horror novel as a romantic fiction but like Bulgarian wine it didn’t travel well and the end result was a farce. If it had been a good farce - does such a thing exist? - then there might have been something in it, but no, it just didn’t work.
Meanwhile, I hadn’t been to France for months and even though one of the farmers had promised to mow the orchard grass for me I spent many waking night hours imagining all of the locals hot-footing it with various of my belongings in the dead of night. Actually they could just as easily have hotfooted it in the middle of the day. They were in France and I was in Reigate, and we both knew this. By now I’d had both of the French houses on the market for a long, long time and there’d only been a couple of offers, both so derisory that I thought they must have accidentally put the comma in the wrong place.
And my UK mortgage was becoming a real problem too. Just about every day someone called me from the lenders and asked what my intentions were. I’d always ask, “Do you mean my intentions towards your daughter?” but this usually went way above their heads. Remember, these people worked for a bank.
One day, fed up with the constant demands for money, I put together a new message on my answerphone. I put more effort into this than anything else I’ve ever done before, and it was good. I pretended to be a crusty English butler and I put on this crusty English butler accent so it went really slowly with lots of atmospheric pauses between the sentences. It went like this.
“Hello. Fortescue the butler here. And I’m afraid you’ve just missed the master. Hmm. Popped out for a little while, he did. I’m not really sure when he’ll be back. Yes. Last I saw of him he was being helped into the rear of a black van. You know, I think it’s called a Black Maria. Yes. That’s what they call them. Well, sad to relate, they closed the doors and drove away with the master aboard. Yes, now I come to think of it the blue light on the roof was flashing. Hmm. I don’t know when he’ll return, and frankly I don’t much like the look of it all. But, well, you could leave a message after the beeping thing and he’ll no doubt get back to you. Well, if he can... Yes. Oh dear. Right rum do. Hmm. Yes, as I said, Fortescue’s the name.”
Well, you just couldn’t stop the bank bozos ringing up and telling all their mates and then they’d all ring up too. You could hear them - “ear, listen to this then, it’s bloody funny”. Mind you, it wasn’t half as funny as them asking for money. I think the tape was good though because one day my mum called and there was a long pause and then she hesitatingly said, “I’m trying to get hold of my son. Will someone tell me where he has been taken to?”
About the same time I had a visit from the VAT Inspector. These people have more powers than the police. The coppers can’t just come bursting into your house (well, they can, but they have to be clutching a warrant of some kind) whereas the VAT Inspector can come waltzing on in anytime he or she feels like it - no paperwork required. So, this serious-faced middle-aged woman turns up because I owe them three hundred quid and I have to let her in and she looks around. I said, “are you expecting to make an offer today, or will you go away and think about it?”
“If we don’t get our money”, she said, staring at me through her Heinrich Himmler glasses  (this gets me - our money. When did I borrow this off them? Really I should have been charging these people for collecting their tax), “then we’ll come back and sell your goods.” At the time this struck me as good news because I’d already been flogging bits and bobs to satisfy my craving. A craving so serious I was getting concerned. Yes, I’m talking about a craving for food - well, one meal a day anyway. The TV had gone soon after the microwave, one of my two CD players had also been sold, and an old computer. One of my friends came round one day and thought I’d been burgled. Anyway, of course this old nazi VAT inspector wasn’t talking about flogging stuff and then giving me some of the proceeds. Oh no, she was just going to take it all for the government.
“As you can see,” I said, sweeping my arm around the near-empty room, “we do not have much in the way of saleable goods.”
Then she looked at the dogs who were sitting there quietly watching her, their tongues hanging out, their large, sorrowful eyes looking tired.
“They’re very big dogs,” she said.
“There aren’t many bigger,” I said.
“What would they be worth then?”
So, just when you think it can’t get any worse, well it does.

Sixteen

Thanks to the recession gripping Britain, the value of my house in Reigate had gone down faster than the Titanic (I mentioned to one of the French people I knew that Andre Citroen, founder of the company that made my automotive water-bucket, designed the steering gear for the Titanic. Quick as a flash the Frenchman replied, “Yes, but you know the iceberg was American...”).
I couldn’t sell the house in France, well at least not for anywhere near the amount I’d paid. Selling would have meant taking a massive loss, and I didn’t feel inclined to do that. You know, the trouble is, sometimes you just can’t see the wood for the trees...
I was out walking with the dogs in Reigate Park one day and I was having a think about my life when I saw these mushrooms. Or at least I thought that’s what they were. My Grandad often used to go out in the woods at his home near Rugby and pick mushrooms and take them home and cook them up in a little butter and eat them just like that, with a bit of crusty bread. I always admired his knowledge of the fungi but Tom told me many years later that the old bloke hadn’t a clue what he was eating. “Jesus”, said Tom, “you can buy them in the bloody supermarket!”  I think Tom missed the point, but you know, you just couldn’t tell him.
Turned out it was just luck that the Grandad had never picked and eaten any of the deadly ones.
The Grandad was interesting. He made a dog kennel for Tingha and it looked excellent but apparently it wasn’t to Tingha’s taste and nothing could entice him inside the bright red, blue and green painted wooden house, at least not until Tom threw a bone in there and the dog growled and snuffled and forced himself inside. We heard a good deal of banging and as Tom, the Grandad and myself watched these movements, the dog inside became more frantic and the sides of the kennel started to bulge and Tom shouted, “Look out! She’s going to go!” and then he started to dance from one foot to another. The Grandad looked at Tom like he was still a little kid and gave him an almighty cuff around the ear. Tom stopped dancing and clutched his ear. He would have been about 30 at the time.
Meanwhile, Tingha had worked himself up into a howling frenzy. I think initially it was about the bone but it had become much bigger than that - now he wanted to get out and there just wasn’t enough room for the shaggy dog to turn around. Suddenly there was a great creaking sound somewhat like an old sailing ship being squeezed in an ice pack in Antarctica (yes, yes, I am only guessing) and then the whole thing burst apart, scattering wood panels, splinter and nails everywhere. Tom and me ducked, Tom with his hands over his head, but the Grandad stood his ground and raised his arm and deflected a great chunk of wood. As the dog came running by he grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and hoisted it right off the ground and held it there like a dead fox. Tingha whimpered and the Grandad slowly put him back down and then he dutifully lay at Grandad’s feet and rolled over on his back, legs up in the air, his pink hairless belly exposed and panting. He’d never done that for any of us.
During World War II, Grandad stayed at home, which to me seemed like an excellent plan. Tom told us once that Grandad’s claim to war-fame was arresting an Irishman at the point of a pitchfork out in the fields at the back of his garden.
Grandad worked at Rugby Radio Station, which you can see as you motor north up the M1. Well, you can see the forest of aerials. What you can’t see is the underground lair where people with headphones stuck to their heads listen in on communications around the world. Once, when my brother and I were just little kids, Grandad took us into Rugby Radio Station and gave us a guided tour of the facilities. I was so young I can’t remember very much about it, except that we were introduced to this one man who was wearing headphones and looking at a massive round radar screen. He smiled when we came along and took his headphones off and Grandad shook his hand and introduced us and the bloke held the headphones out to me and I awkwardly tried to put them on my head until Grandad took them and roughly placed them over my ears, drowning me with language.
I could hear a man speaking but I couldn’t understand him and then there was a pause and I heard another man speaking and I couldn’t understand him either. Then the headphones came off and the bloke put them back on again and he pointed to a blip on the screen and said, “Russian submarine. In the Barents Sea. That’s the captain speaking to his base.”
When I was a bit older - I think about eight - I had to learn some French. We were going to Grandad’s and we were going to meet a friend of his - a Frenchman.
I learnt to say, “Bonjour Monsieur. Je m’appelle King”. It wasn’t much but it took a lot of practice. When I met the man he was tall and distinguished and grey-haired and I stood before him and spoke the words and he smiled down at me and shook my hand - I think he was the first person to ever do this grown-up thing with me - and I felt strength there in his grasp. This man was old then but Tom told me he’d been a leading French Resistance fighter during the war. How our Grandad of Irishman-on-end-of-pitchfork fame knew him, I don’t really know. It’s one of those family mysteries, but there’s a story in there somewhere about spies, and cloaks, and daggers, and one day I’ll find out all about it and write it.
Apart from that, Grandad was a normal grandfather, or at least I assumed he was. My friend Mike and me used to go and stay in the grandparents’ big old house sometimes and we’d roam the apple orchards with our hand-made bows and arrows and shoot at his apples, bringing a whole load of them down one afternoon and making them useless to eat. We also used to hang over the gate of the pigpen and kick the wooden door so the pigs would go mad. Once we were doing this and Grandad crept up behind us with a big plank of wood and whacked our arses hard and said, “Get down off that fence you little buggers! Worrying me pigs. And go and pick up all them apples. You can peel ‘em for the pie.” And then he’d tramp off into the fields out back to look for mushrooms (or maybe even an Irishman or two) hiding out there in the long golden summer grass.
So, I saw these great big fat mushrooms in Reigate Park and I thought I’ll have those, so I picked them and took them home and then I went out into my backyard and had a look around and found some dandelion leaves and I took them in and washed them and then I gently fried the mushrooms in olive oil of course, no butter for me, and then I chucked in the dandelion leaves, gave it all a stir, popped it on a plate and looked at it. That was my evening meal. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In fact, I had so little work, so little income, it had got to the stage where most days that was my one and only meal.
Sometimes I’d pick berries off the bushes in the park and eat as I walked. I started looking at all the other plants I saw out on my walks and because I’d always bought loads of books I scoured them for knowledge about the edible ones. I tell you, I was getting to be quite an expert. Maybe my next book will be Survivor! They Thought He Would Die Alone! (I figure any confusion with a crap but successful TV program has to be a winner in the book game. You know, you’ve got to use all your resources). Underneath, the catch-line would be, “Almost starving. Poor beyond belief. Then nature came to the rescue!”
I think I have the expertise required to put that one together quite nicely.
See, things had got really bad. I had virtually no income. I’d finished the novel, which I thought was a real accomplishment - 90,000 words of horror - that’s horror as in genre, not as in horrible bollocks, well, that’s what I thought anyway. I’d managed to get an agent but he kept asking me if I wouldn’t rather get another full-time job. It didn’t exactly fill me brim-full with confidence.
I had to cut down on everything. Soon the Citroen would have to go.
The thing is, every day the dogs were travelling in the car when I drove to the woods to take them for a walk. Apparently it smelt like a dog kennel in there.
I say apparently because I’d obviously got used to it myself but when I drove along the High Street with the windows down and the dogs in the back, people would stagger in the street and cover their noses with their handkerchiefs, as if the plague were passing.
When the time came to sell the car I took it up the road to one of those car valet places. The guy looked at it and then took a deep breath, which wasn’t wise because the dog odours infiltrated his airways, and caused a massive sneezing fit, which went on for some considerable time. However, his partner said he’d do what he could and could I come back in two days.
When I went back I saw all of the Citroen’s seats hanging from the rafters, still dripping water. “Had to give them a right seeing-to, mate. High pressure hose and all that.”
I went away and left it for another two days. When I went back everything had been reassembled and the gleaming Citroen stood there good as or even better than when it came out of the showroom.
I drove it to a Citroen dealer; careful to pick one who was not familiar with the pungent odours that had so recently made their home there. I couldn’t believe the transformation though - this car was just so clean it was unbelievable. I didn’t think it had looked this good when it was new.
The car salesman gave it the once over outside and commented on the amazingly bright and blemish-free bodywork, while the gleaming red paintwork simply made him stand back and admire, arms crossed, silently nodding his head, a firm smile on his face. “Might have a buyer for this already,” he said.
Then we climbed inside and he had a drive.
 “Goes well,” he said as he took it sideways through a roundabout and accelerated briskly up the road. “Low mileage too. Nice colour.”
Then he turned to me. “You’ve got dogs then?” He gave me a cold smile, “I think I can almost tell the breed.”
I stared ahead out of the windscreen.
All I can tell you is that the secondhand price on a one owner, two-dogs, Citroen ZX is not good. Not good at all.

One dark night I was watching French TV when I saw a light bobbing around outside in the orchard. I looked again, more closely this time and yes, there was definitely someone out there in the utter darkness in my orchard late at night armed with a flashlight. Now, in France you have to be careful because in the country anyone can, and everyone does, have a gun.
When I first went there I popped down to the local town and strolled into the gun shop and asked them what I could buy. They rolled a Tomahawk cruise missile out of the back of the store. No, not really, but it was a bit like that. I could have had a pump-action shotgun. Now, what would you want with one of those in rural France? Or anywhere for that matter...
Anyway, the torchlight bobbed about and I went out and took a deep breath of that silky night air. So clean and sharp, it went down into my lungs slick as good wine rolls on into your stomach. And it had the same effect, making me light-headed and happy, despite the fact that there was a serial killer out here who seemed to be roaming my fruit trees. Briefly I turned my head up and looked at the sky. Until you’ve seen the night sky out in the country you’ve never seen anything. It is so amazing. So vast, so large, so deeply black you feel you could be sucked right up into it and become one of those stars. There is just so much light in amongst the black, there’s just got to be so much life out there. How could there not be? Anyway, on that night I swear to you I saw my one and only shooting star flash across the heavens trailing a sparkling tail of glory. I don’t know what it meant but on that cool winter’s night I hoped it didn’t mean I was going to meet my maker.
I walked on ground as hard as iron, grass crackling as the night frost crept in. I cocked my head to see if I could hear anything. I squinted into the darkness and yes, I could see the torchlight. At least I thought that’s what it was. I wasn’t sure anymore. What with the darkness and the fact that the orchard backed onto miles of open fields, it could have been a light the size of a planet way, way away and the trees making it quiver as they moved in front of it. But then the wind that was rustling the skeletal beech trees reached me and it made me shiver because I heard a voice muttering. This wasn’t looking good and for a moment or two I thought of running back into the house and locking the doors and trying to work out the French for, help, I’ve got a nutcase serial killer in my garden, to which they would have replied, is he English or French? and I would have said, I think he’s French! and then they would have said, okay monsieur that’s all right then, and put the phone down. But I didn’t do that. Trouble was, my imagination really took over and I imagined doing just that with the phone and then hearing someone walking slowly up to the door in the pitch black and then banging on it, probably with the butt of a pump-action shotgun, one long bang after another and me whimpering inside, and then the door splintering and smashing and some French nutcase coming in and killing me and nobody would ever know what had happened because I was English and they wouldn’t bother trying to find out! I was going to die!
I would have got in the Citroen and driven it up and shone the lights out over the orchard but the battery kept going flat, something to do with the copious amounts of water that were flooding around inside its body (sometimes when I drove and then braked hard I could hear water sloshing around. I don’t know how it got in there, or actually even where it all was, but I suspect by now it will have corroded the whole car). Anyway, I decided against that. The only thing worse than being caught in the house by a French nutter would have been being caught in the car by a French nutter, with me feverishly trying to lock the car doors. The Citroen’s central locking was temperamental at the best of times and in fact, once on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue, the horn started to toot of its own accord and at the same time one of the electric windows wound itself down and the central locking popped on and off. The culmination of all this activity was a snapped clutch cable. Apparently the French designed it so that it ran through or around some electric junction box. No, I don’t know why either, but the AA man told me that apparently it could have had something to do with the copious amounts of wine the French drink at lunchtime.  
The AA man replaced the clutch cable and then I was on my way. Unfortunately the horn wouldn’t stop tooting and as I drove through Streatham later that night I tooted all of the prostitutes as I went and was then pulled over by the police who said, “Now then sir, what’s all that about then?”
Anyway, out in this French orchard in the dead of night I decided that something had to be done, it was no good hiding, so I started to walk on the crisp winter grass towards the bobbing light which now seemed to be going around in circles. As I got closer I could hear more muttering and I realised that whoever it was out here was probably drunk. As I got closer I could see someone and he was thin and though he was muttering like a senile old man he sounded quite young. I figured then that this must be one of the boys from the hovel next door, one of the sons of the man who seemed to be on first name terms with the local gendarmes.
When I walked right up to him I saw he was looking at the ground and seemed to be stumbling in wide circles. Clearly he was very drunk and I guess he must have lost his way, probably when he popped out to the little boy’s room. I tapped him on the shoulder and he screamed and snapped his head up, the torch suddenly up vertical, lighting his face so he looked like a ghoul and I screamed and he stared at me with wide open eyes and then he screamed and ran off into the darkness in the general direction of the hovel, his arms up in the air, the torch still held in his hand, waving around like a firefly on speed, his screams echoing off the surrounding hills.
I went back to my house and locked the doors and went to bed. In the middle of the night I heard what sounded like a shotgun going off.

******
When I was first handed the keys I quickly discovered that due to the peculiarities of the French electricity system if you had more than four lights on and then tried to watch TV you’d be suddenly plunged into darkness. The first time it happened I thought it must have been a power cut. In fact, The General had warned me about this. He’d said, “Old chap, the power system was designed by men who...” well you know the rest - but because there was nothing to do out here in deepest and often darkest France I eventually walked up the road in the gathering dusk and found that other people in the scattered hamlet had their lights on. So I returned and after a bit of a search I found the main power switch, which had automatically tripped. I put it back on and the power of four small candles returned to the rat-infested place.
At first I did wonder what I’d done, buying this place in the middle of France, a country whose language I had despised when I was a schoolboy. Actually that’s not strictly true - I just didn’t like the French teacher, Mr Bell, or as we preferred to call him, Monsieur Ding-Dong. He never raised his voice, always spoke softly, almost a whisper, and it drove us mad. If he’d lost his temper every now and again it would have been simply great, and it would have made sense. As it was he just softly whispered and it made us all mad. Anyway, that’s another story.
I began to ask myself the big questions, like what the hell was I doing with my life? It reminded me of one of my friends, back when we were at school. One day John came to school and he said, “You know what, I was sitting on the bog this morning doing a number two and I asked myself, what’s it all about? I mean, what is the meaning of life? And you know, I thought about it for a good while and then I said to myself, what the fuck’s it got to do with me.”  
I could understand that. It seemed a good way to look at it. Here I was, in my thirties and I was single and there was no doubt I was running out of money and that soon my house in Reigate would be repossessed. About the only asset I had was an old house in France. Well, let’s not forget the rats, I had a whole extended family of those. And just across the way there was a house full of nutcases. In spite of all this I was asking myself a big question. Did I want to move out here and try my luck?

to be continued...

I could move to France...
After all, I had no less than two houses in France, which sounds a bit grand. Actually, I suppose it was.
 I had this big stone house set in a large courtyard with a massive cherry tree in the middle, which in the summer stained the ground red with its fruit and seemed to buzz as thousands of bees devoured the syrup.
I had a big stone barn and a massive wine cellar. Next door I owned another house, though that was pretty derelict (okay, it’s either derelict or it isn’t, and it was) and I had over three acres of land, an acre and a half of it stuffed with just about every fruit tree you could imagine, and a large bed of herbs and a massive old walnut tree and a bay leaf tree and, well, I could have lived there and picked mushrooms out of the orchard every day and if I’d had the inclination or nature I could have bought a gun and popped the odd rabbit that came gambolling across the fields behind the orchard. I could have planted a veggie patch and lived happily ever after.
The houses in France had no loans on them. I’d bought them for cash in the days when I’d been gainfully employed and had lots of the folding stuff.  In my mind I had what I suppose was a romantic image; me speaking fluent French, selling apples, pears, peaches, plums and cherries from my orchard, teaching French to impressionable young French girls who would swoon at my double-plus of being an Englishman and a best-selling novelist, and one thing would lead to another and next I knew I’d be married to Emmanuelle Beart and living happily ever after, writing that definitive second novel, swiftly followed by the third and so on.
Of course, it sounds pretty idyllic. There was only one problem...there were an awful lot of French people about...
In fairness my attitude to all things Gallic was mostly coloured by the folks next door. They had more visits from the gendarmerie than criminals, which got me thinking...they must be criminals. They lived in this old falling down house in which they brewed illicit substances, which the young men of the family consumed in copious quantities.
Anyway, when I bought the first place it was pretty much run down – for example there was no ceiling, it was just open to the roof tiles. So I got my brother to come down with me for a few weeks to sort it out.
Now, I know nothing about anything practical and frankly I’m always surprised when I’ve managed to dress myself in the mornings and if a tie is involved, well if I get that right first time I feel we are cooking with gas. My brother on the other hand could take the Space Shuttle to pieces and rebuild it in a day and it will go even faster and be much improved (and possibly the tiles will stay on too...). He’s always had this gift and it is remarkable to me. I once said to him, “you must wonder how I can write?” and he said, “No, not really.”
Hmm.
The thing is, the house in France will never fall down. It was built in 1714, before the French Revolution, and I’m sure it will outlive most of us.
Downstairs there was a large flagstone-floored lounge with the biggest fireplace you’ve ever seen. You could stand inside it and look up straight out at the sky. It burnt more wood each evening than you could poke a stick at, but by golly did it produce some heat. In the winter I’d go to bed with a glowing, red face, the skin stretched tight like I’d been on the beach all day. It was great.
In the lounge there were massive roof beams, and these were truly massive, let me tell you. I don’t think you’ll see trees this size any more, not least because they were holding up the ceiling and hanging the walls together in my house in France. When the forests that contained these trees existed it must have been just awesome to walk amongst them.
There was no kitchen, just a concrete-floored room with an old gas-bottle fuelled cooker in it. Hot water was courtesy of an ancient gas fired wall mounted water heater. I tell you, you couldn’t have successfully washed a gerbil in the hot water that thing gave you at any one time.
There were some truly great things about the place though. Firstly it had been built with two-foot thick white stone, which had been quarried out of the ground not far from where it was built. There were two levels, the top being one long open-plan area with wooden floors, and not polished ones either, this was truly an original house, not one of those designer places made to look original, if you follow me. When I moved in, there was no ceiling upstairs, just the backside of the terracotta tiles, which sat on roof battens, themselves supported by a network of wooden beams. The beams were made of the hardest wood I’ve ever seen and they were not hewn straight, they still had plenty of the original trees in them, so they were knotted and curved. It was sobering to think this place had been built around 200 years ago, and it was still mostly original. It would take more than a huff and puff to blow these walls down. And the house had been built without foundations because in those days they didn’t understand that you could do with some roots in the ground. Never mind, it was solid as rock, which in fact was exactly what it was.
The beams in the large lounge room downstairs were dirty brown and between them the ceiling was painted a bright turquoise colour. Now, you always think of the French as having more than a bit of style, but take a good look. They don’t always get it right. Okay, they’ve had some great painters and they keep most of their old buildings, unlike the Brits and the Australians who seem to think that if it’s old it should be flattened and something new built in its place, and they dress pretty well and their cars don’t look bad (notice I said ‘look’ - believe me, they have plenty to learn about reliability...) but have a closer look. Look inside some of their homes. I tell you, it is screamingly bad.
Now, the agents who helped me buy the house were pompous English types - let’s call them the Boulevards. He was married to this much, much younger English woman and she was like a lot of those upper class English women - they just have no confidence and so they are always apologising about things. You know, like if someone runs over their foot with a car they’ll grimace and say, “Sorry!” The funny thing is, they are usually good at something, though in fairness in her case this seemed to amount to putting croissants in the oven in the mornings and then taking them out before they burned. She was really good at that. I stayed at their place once when I was looking at places to buy and in the bathroom cupboard under the sink they had hundreds of bars of Imperial Leather bath soap. Literally hundreds. No, I don’t know why.
Anyway, my novelist’s mind soon had a story forming in my head about how he’d been married before and then thrown it all away, left his Jaguar and the wife in Egham and run off with this girl who used to be his secretary and now they were living in hiding in France eking out a living as estate agents. Under their bed they had whips and...oh sorry, the imagination went off a bit there.
They were your typical English upper middle-class who’d somehow fallen on hard times and yet they acted out this lie that they were landed gentry. They hated the idea of lowly English types like me coming to live in their corner of the world, and they didn’t even hide their feelings very well. But they really did like my money.
Boulevard heard I was coming over with my brother and he asked me if we had room in the van for a bed that they’d ordered from some swanky British store. I have no idea why they didn’t buy a bed in France, after all there seemed to be plenty of them about in the shops and most people had at least one in their houses. Whatever the reason, I said I’d bring it over.
My brother and I loaded the new bed into the van and took it down to France and turned up at his place. We had a beer with him (he never offered wine. I think he figured I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the finer points of its well-rounded bouquet, its complex texture and velvety, layered flavours) and we sat in his living room, the lights down low on this particular winter’s evening and a fire playing in the grate, its yellow and orange flames flickering as the wood crackled and hissed.
We talked about the differences between the French and the English and he said that you could never quite trust a Frenchman, which struck me as rather strange in that he’d decided to live out here in deepest France and had taken the trouble to speak what appeared to be faultless French.
Anyway, we started talking about your Frenchman’s style and as I cupped my beer and let the fire warm one side of my face I said, “You know, sometimes it amazes me what they do here.”
“You mean?” asked Boulevard.
“Mean what?” asked my brother.
“Mean?” he said.
My brother frowned at him and leaned forward in his chair to see if that would help his understanding. It didn’t.
I took over the line of questioning.
“Well, don’t you think it’s funny that they are renowned for their style and then they go and do some really stupid things?”
“Like?”
“Yes, I like it a lot,” said my brother, revolving his empty bottle in his hands and looking at the beer suds on the inside, “and yes I’ll have another one. Thanks very much Monsieur Bou-le-arse.” My brother never really got the hang of French.
Boulevard glared at him over his half-moon glasses for a second or two and then looked at me with his eyebrows raised in a question.
“Well,” I said, “take the interior of their houses. I moved into mine and between the roof beams the previous owners had painted the ceiling a hideous turquoise colour.”
“Yes,” said my brother, slowly putting his empty beer bottle on a small side table, “and that woman in the bank. We saw her house and she’d painted her ceiling bloody bright yellow and the beams were bright blue!”
“Exactly,” I laughed, “and the bloke in the house just down the road from us. Jesus, his ceiling was pink.”
Boulevard took in a deep breath and leaned back in his chair and said, "There’s no accounting for taste old chap, no accounting at all.”
And the fire crackled and a silence fell, I leaned back in my chair and rested my beer bottle on my stomach and I looked up at the ceiling and in the flickering light from the fire I discovered that it was a bright red, in amongst a collection of bright green roof beams. I didn’t move for quite some time, though I did scrunch my eyes closed and my buttocks clenched so tight my brother jumped and said, “what was that!?”

to be continued...

I dialled the number and asked for Building magazine.
“They’ve all gone,” said the receptionist.
“Lunch already,” I chortled, looking at my watch, “what time d’you expect them back?”
There was a silence and I thought maybe I’d been cut off and then she said, “No, I mean they’ve gone. They’re never coming back. The magazine’s been closed down. They’ve all been made redundant.”
“Oh, I see. Okay, what about Plumbing. Can you put me through to the editor?”
“Same thing, love. All those magazines, they’ve all been closed down. It’s the recession.”
I walked around the house for a while and had a think. I’d been writing weekly articles on cars and vans for those magazines. It was good money and the demise of these publications was going to mean a big bite out of my earnings. Still, I was working for other people too, other magazines and newspapers, and money was still coming in. At the same time I was busy writing my first novel and that was taking a lot of my time, mainly because I enjoyed doing it.
Then a friend of mine, The General as we all called him, who was editor of a major motoring magazine left and went to work somewhere else. It was he who told me, “this is a car built by men who drink wine at lunch”.
At the time, the bulk of my income came from this car magazine and now The General was moving on and they employed a young editor who’d never worked on a car magazine in his life. He brought in his own mates and soon I was frozen out.
Never mind...I still had a few other sources of writing income. But pretty soon they began to dry up too as magazine publishers told their staff that to save money they had to do the work, rather than use freelancers.
At one time I’d been writing for almost every Fleet Street paper but this recession was showing no mercy to anyone and it wasn’t long before I had hardly any work coming in at all. It’s amazing how quickly things can change.
I began to think seriously about what I was going to do. Money was fast becoming an issue and I had a mortgage on the place in Reigate. Thanks to the recession and the sudden drop in house prices my mortgage was more than the house was worth. If I’d had a job it wouldn’t have been too bad, I could have just sat it out, but I didn’t have a regular income. It was a problem.
But then I had an idea....

I decided to get two dogs. They were Bernese Mountain dogs and they weighed about eight stone each. To put that in perspective, when you took them out for a walk and they started to pull it was like Pavarotti was on the lead. Yes of course I was fit. You had to be.
Several years had passed and I’d decided to become a freelance journalist. That’s where the dogs came in. Bear with me. I took the freelance route for a number of reasons, not least because it was taking me an hour-and-a-half to travel to work very day, and most of that ‘travel time’ was spent not travelling. It was time spent in a queue of traffic whose only saving grace was that it gave me time to think. And when I started thinking, there was really only one thought that kept nagging away inside my head - why was I doing this?
In one idle hour between Reigate and Teddington I worked out that if I kept this up until I retired I’d have sat in traffic for a total of no less than five years. Seriously, this is not something you want to do - not unless you like to collect car number plates and put them in a notebook, which is something I did when I was a kid, but then that’s another story.
The other thing was this - I wanted to write a novel. But I think firstly the idea of going freelance came about because I don’t like work...
Well, what I mean is, I don’t like working for companies. It’s stifling. All the time I worked for someone else I felt uncomfortable, unhappy even and sometimes I even felt like a spy; I felt like someone who’s professing his love for the west when really he loves the way it works out east. And I never, but never, liked the idea of teamwork; even the word just never sounded right to me. I eventually came to realise, I like to work by myself. I often think about Donna Tartt who wrote those most excellent books, The Secret History and The Little Friend who once said, “I was always the little kid in the corner of the backseat of the car reading a book”. And nothing wrong with that, if you ask me; I think it’s nice and cosy in that corner.
Also, I discovered over time and with a bit of experimentation that I didn’t much like the idea of owning my own company either. Someone once told me that when you run your own company you have to keep a notebook and pencil on the bedside cabinet because you’re going to spend most of the night lying awake wondering what the hell you’re going to do to keep your company afloat. The theory is that you write down whatever’s on your mind and then you go back to sleep. Only, you know the notebook and pencil are there so you just keep waking up and making notes and you never get any sleep. So, I’d decided that wasn’t for me either, because I like my sleep.
You know, I think that if you want to go and paint or act, or even write a book, you should do it. Okay, okay, I’m not daft, I know you need money to survive, but as you will see, there are more ways of getting the folding stuff than you thought. It isn’t that difficult, given a bit of imagination.  
My theory then was this - write a novel, make loads of money, you don’t have any responsibilities to people you employ, or to shareholders, and also you can have a dog or two.  
Now, things had moved on a lot since the Tingha days, not least that I knew a mongrel could be very bad news indeed and also that dogs need training, otherwise they tend to do annoying things like attempt to mount women in the street.
So after my normal slow journey into work that day I marched into my boss’s office and resigned. I told him I’d be happy to work as a consultant and that I was going off to be a freelance journalist. This was most excellent because at that time I not only had a house in Reigate just outside London but I also had two houses in France, (patience, patience, dear reader...) and the folks at work agreed to pay me a reasonable monthly retainer. I had plenty of freelance work lined-up because I’d been planning it for some time and by the time I took the freelance plunge I was a well known motoring journalist, so I could still book in road test cars.
So, I spent the next six months or so booking in Porsches, Jags, BMWs and Mercs, plus an assortment of out-and-out sports cars, whacked down to Dover every weekend, got on the ferry and six hours later I was in deepest France having one of those small French beers. This really was one of the best times of my life.
It was just so great having all of these ridiculously fast and expensive cars to drive around in; it was most excellent to have the reasonable money I was earning and it was fine to be 32 and fit and I was learning French and boy-oh-boy did I feel like I was sucking diesel! I tell you, if you happen to be 32 now, make the most of it - it goes so fast and then all of a sudden it’s gone.
And I was dreaming about that novel I’d soon write. The novel that would take me up there alongside Stephen King and Dean Koontz, on a par with John le Carre (I would add John Grisham, but at that time nobody had heard of him. Now he’s earning $70million a year. I’m glad he wasn’t around when I was trying to write a novel - his virtually overnight success might have made me hang myself). I dreamed of the film offers, I reckoned I’d go to Hollywood and write the screenplay of my book and then of course I’d win an Oscar for best screenplay and end up living with some hot Hollywood starlet and just occasionally I’d fly into Heathrow and people would point and say, isn’t that the guy who’s married to...Well, you have to have a dream.
Clearly this wasn’t going to happen overnight so first I thought I’d get some dogs. They’d keep me company while I worked on The Big Book. I’d decided on two because I figured they could keep each other company.
I researched the dog market like I was a new car buyer. I bought all of the books I could, I got dog magazines, I even rented a video on dog training. I was determined not to get myself into a Son of Tingha situation so I researched like there was no tomorrow. I bought magazines with titles like Doggie, Dogs at Large, What Dog?, Canine World, and On All Fours, which turned out to be nothing at all to do with dogs, well, only incidentally, but in my defence I didn’t know that at the time. You can also get Big Dogs, Dogs that Don’t Bite, and How to Choose a Dog for Life. Of course there are also scare books like Dogs That Turned Bad! and People Who Are Dogs, but I’m not sure if that last one is really about dogs at all either.
Eventually I settled on the Bernese, which is a big St Bernard type dog, and it’s also from Switzerland, but it’s more the size of a big Golden Retriever. This animal fitted all my requirements; big enough that it would never get under my feet, good temperament, frightening to most burglars, not in need of masses of exercise, and longish hair so you could actually stroke them if you wanted. Then all I had to do was find them and buy them.
These were not common dogs when I started looking and it was a while before they began to become fashionable. I believe I was one of the early fashion adopters in this case, the first time that’s ever happened (and probably the last) and a source of some pride to me, I can tell you.
It was difficult to track them down. I made many phone calls to dog people who quizzed me as if I was trying to buy a Kalashnikov or a box of Semtex. Where do you live, do you have a garden, have you ever been accused of pet abuse, have you any intention of moving abroad and selling them to Korean restaurants - that sort of thing. Eventually I was put in touch with this bloke down in Cornwall whose bitch - that’s the dog you understand - was about to give birth.
This dog world has a whole set of its own phrases. For example, if a dog breeder says, “I’m real busy, my bitch is about to lay down”, or, “sorry, got to go, the bitch is on heat and it’s now or never”, usually he is referring to his dogs and not a close female friend. Of course there will always be exceptions to this, but as a rule it’s the dog, or bitch as we dog lovers like to call her, that is going through the trauma of birth or sexual arousal on the living room carpet, not the breeder’s girlfriend. Just wanted to make that clear...
So I go and visit Ronald the breeder and I pick a dog. And then I pick another and I drive away from there with Benson and Mitchell. Now, I don’t intend to turn all doggy-mushy and go on about what beautiful little bundles they were and how they each had very different and definable characters, but they were and they did.
Mitchell - was so named because Ronald thought he reminded him of a little black monkey that he used to have as a kid. He used to hang this animal around his neck and talk to it and apparently it talked back. I was led to believe it was a toy monkey but you never know with these people. Once they develop a relationship with an animal it is all consuming and generally leads to a state where they believe animals are vastly superior to human beings. To listen to them talk it beats me why none of these people have trained their dogs to drive a car or take a job as a tax collector, though just because I haven’t heard of this doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Ask any dog breeder - he’ll know of at least one car driving Basset hound doing the rounds in his Mini Metro. And what’s wrong with that, he’ll ask.
Mitchell was a headstrong dog. On the way back from Cornwall he sat bolt upright in the front seat and alternately glanced at the speedo, then at me and finally at the door. Some years later as a fully-grown dog he was doing exactly this as I caned an Alfa Romeo along a country lane. Eventually I think the increasing speed became too much for him and he leaned across and bit me hard on the ear, causing me to go yow! and swerve off the road, down into a ditch where I landed upside down. We were there for 14 hours before anyone spotted us and came to help.
On another occasion we met a woman and her small poodle - Donut the dog’s name was, I didn’t get hers - in the woods outside Dorking. Mitchell began to play with the dog, then picked it up by the scruff of the neck and ran off with it into the trees. Where’s he going with Donut, the owner asked plaintively and I nervously replied that he was just playing. We tramped through the woods and though we couldn’t see him we could hear him crushing the undergrowth so we had a rough idea of where he was. Donut! she kept shouting. Eventually we found them in a small clearing. Donut was sitting by his side shivering while Mitchell feverishly dug a hole in the soft black earth. He’s going to bury Donut sobbed the women. No, I said, he’s just playing, but I knew he was going to bury the dog. I think he was offended by this coiffured bitch out in the woods (I mean the dog...). He’d have said to Donut, in dog language of course, look, this is no place for you. This is a place for big dogs. It’s my place and that’s the way it’s gonna stay. Now, look pooch, no hard feelings but I’m gonna be saying goodbye now. And by the way, that woman with you - why’s she wearing stilettos out in the woods?
Anyway, I dragged Mitchell away and we never saw Donut or her stiletto-wearing owner again.
Other times when we were in the woods Mitchell would just run off and I’d spend hours looking for him, tramping through the undergrowth, tree branches whipping my face, lush ferns soaking my jeans right through, the evening darkness coming on down and all the while I’d be shouting out his name as a worried, skittish Benson walked alongside me, his body bumping my legs as we struggled on, looking for the lost dog.
Of course Mitchell was never lost. He’d just got bored and found his own way back to the car. When Benson and I eventually arrived back there he’d be curled up asleep by my Citroen’s side and he’d open one eye as we approached and then get to his feet, have a shake and look at us as if to say, so there you are, I’ve been waiting for hours!
Try my patience? What do you think?
Benson - as I said, he liked to stick close. This was the all-time cowardly dog. When he was a puppy and I took him and Mitchell out into the woods in the snow, Benson would walk between my legs. This was not easy, either for him or for me.  Eventually he got out of that habit but then he’d follow me so close I could feel his cold nose against the back of my knee. When he got bigger, much bigger, he still tried to get between my legs and it looked like I was doing some horse-riding trick, only it was a dog I was riding around the woods. I suspect locals still talk about the mysterious Short Dog-Riding Man of Dorking Woods.
The other thing was, if ever there was a dogfight these two played no part in it. How could they, they were Swiss. As someone once said to me, the Swiss got rich by holding other people’s coats. If you think about it, it’s true, they never get involved, they just hold the coats and bank the money. The dogs were like that, and that was good because I never had to wade in and rescue them.
The great thing about these dogs was that I’d take them out for an hour or so in the woods then pile them back into the Citroen and they’d sleep on the 20 minute drive back from there to Reigate. When they staggered out they’d collapse in the house and sleep until late evening when I’d take them for a run in Reigate Park. Then they’d sleep most of the night. Jesus, it was like having kids.
All in all life was pretty good. I had this big house in Reigate, two in France, swish cars to drive around in - and the Citroen, but then that’s another story... and these two big dogs that provided endless hours of, well, hardly fun, but at least they kept me reasonably amused. Oh yeah, I was earning some reasonable money too.
But then one day it all started to go wrong. Very wrong indeed.

Now, because I’d decided to leave car magazines behind for a while I needed to buy a car. For 12 years I’d had a different road test car every week, but now I needed my very own set of wheels.
Yes, I know it was stupid, but I decided to buy a Citroen ZX. Mind you, in my defence, I was only young at the time. I must admit though, I was foolish enough to be swayed by the car’s beautiful Gallic lines, its sumptuous interior and its gleaming bodywork. I thrilled to its magic-carpet ride and the lavish equipment level. I proudly showed it off to my friends and even helped them clamber aboard so they could run their hands over the welcoming leather seats. It truly seemed to be the most excellent car and I was madly, deeply in love.
Soon the affair started to go bad, very bad indeed. Firstly the gearlever became loose and the dealer told me, “they’re all like that, mate” but later as I executed a swift change from second to third I discovered I was holding a gearlever that was no longer connected to the car. I jammed it back in its orifice and continued, rather jerkily, on my way.
When it rained the car’s skin filled with water. What I mean is, water somehow got in between the interior and exterior walls and sloshed around every time I braked or accelerated. I had the car for a year in the end and no dealer, not even Citroen themselves, ever discovered how the water got in. No one could fully drain it out either. It also invaded the footwells so I took to driving in wellington boots, which is not cool in summer. There were numerous other faults too, far too many to list here (though I hope to have a book out soon) and it became something of a running joke with my friends, the ones who had previously fingered the leather.
Of course I complained vociferously to anyone who would listen. I wrote letters to newspapers, I sent one - in French it should be said - to Citroen’s head office, I even considered trudging the streets wearing a placard (in the rain of course, so it was appropriately sodden). But one day I was stopped in my complaining tracks by a somewhat pompous friend of mine (yes, of course he was English) who puffed himself up and told me, “old chap, what you have to remember is that this is a car built by men who drink wine at lunch”. Indeed.

In truth I didn’t have to apply for the editor’s job at the men’s magazine because they approached me (on a street corner...no not really, sorry, I just can’t help it). See, I’d launched the car magazine and then I’d been in charge of a whole group of them as well as some hifi publications. By then I’d got a pretty good reputation for taking magazines, rejuvenating them and then relaunching them, so I think they thought I could do the same with this magazine full of naked women. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?
Now, you might think – well some of you might think, the blokes mostly – that this would be a dream job, staring at naked women all day, interviewing rising young pornolettes and then deciding just how explicit they should be on any given page. But it’s not. It’s just like working on any other magazine. Actually perhaps it’s a bit different to working on Budgie World or Extruded Cement Monthly  (incorporating Flyovers) but really after a while you get a bit bored with all the vacuous pouty girls with large breasts, their long legs and short skirts, their revealing underwear and, yes, their naked flesh, and you just get on with the job.
I think the only people who don’t eventually get bored and always rise to the occasion are the photographers. As it happened, one of them (snappers, we call them) had worked with me on car magazines (he liked to say he’d swapped one kind of bodywork for another – tish-boom). His name was Bill.
Now, Bill was married to a very nice lady called Sophie and they lived in a very nice Victorian terraced house in Islington, so they were doing all right. The problem was, Bill found it very hard to keep his hands on his telephoto lens and it was a well-known fact across the industry that he usually ended up having a fling with the models. I guess the temptation was great, if you think about it. Here you have a girl who wants to take her clothes off in front of you because you are handy with a probing camera (most of these girls thought it a good stepping stone to page 3 of The Sun, such were their stratospheric ambitions...) and not too surprisingly one thing often led to another. The other thing was that all the snappers on all the magazines knew each other so the girls knew they could get work on other magazines too by being, how shall I put this, friendly and personable with the snappers.
Anyway, one day I’m sitting at my desk and the phone rings and it’s Bill. He’s shooting the main pictorial for the relaunch issue and as always in magazines, we’re running late. It’s vitally important we get the film off him asap.
“Hey, mate, can you get over the studio now?”
Bill’s studio was in an old converted warehouse near Canary Wharf, which at that time was just going up, so there were still plenty of old dockyard buildings. It looked a dangerous place to be, but in a strange way I liked it.
“Well,” I said quietly, looking with a magnifying glass at some pictures of a girl called Sadie who was destined for the next issue, “I’ve got my hands a bit full at the moment.”
“Look,” said Bill, “I need some trousers.”
“Trousers?”
“Yeah, and a shirt. Socks would be good. And can you bring some dresses or skirts and panties?”
“Bill, you’re supposed to supply your own props, you know this.”
“No,” said Bill, “you don’t understand. Get round here.”
I shook my head.
“Please, mate.”
“God, you’re so annoying.”
When I got there he opened the door a crack and when he saw it was me he let me in. He was completely naked. So were the three blonde girls in the bed.
“Bill, is this a joke?”
“Mate, Sophie came round.”
“Yes?”
They just looked at me.
No, no, no,” I said, slowly sitting on the edge of the bed.
So, Sophie had had enough of Bill’s antics. She’d come around the studio, used a key she’d got copied, entered, and found Bill in bed with the three buxom blondes. She’d gone, in his words, “absolutely mental” and stormed around, eventually snatching his clothes and the girls' clothes off the floor. I asked him why none of them did anything and he looked at me as if I was absolutely mental myself and said, “we were all naked and in bed, mate”.
“There is one other thing,” said Bill.
“There would be, wouldn’t there?”
“Yeah, she took the camera and the film.”
“God almighty, Bill. You’ll have to reshoot straight away,” I said.
The girls looked terrified.
“No way,” said one of them, “that woman is –“
“Yeah, I know,” I said snappily, “absolutely mental. Jesus. So, you have to go around there Bill and get that film.”
They all stared at me.
Half an hour later, by which time of course it had begun to rain, I was standing on the steps of a Victorian terrace house in Islington in my long raincoat, banging on the door. After a while I crouched down and opened the letter box and shouted, “Soph, come on. I need those pictures of the girls.”
“Go to hell,” she shouted back from down their echoing hallway. I could see her in there, camera in hand, eyes blazing.
“Come on, be fair,” I said.
“Yes, yes, be fair,” she shouted, “that’s what he’s being isn’t it, shagging all those slappers. That’s fair isn’t it?”
“I think he was just taking pictures of them. Come on, give me the film.”
“The film, the bloody film? You want the film of this animal of a husband shagging these slappers?”
“YES,” I shouted back, getting fed up now, “GIVE ME THE FILM OF THE BLOODY ANIMAL HUSBAND SHAGGING THE BLOODY SLAPPERS AND PLEASE GIVE IT TO ME NOW!”
And at that moment, thinking back, I remembered hearing the soft thunk of a car door and I turned around from my crouching position to see two coppers in their fluorescent yellow jackets coming up the steps. And as I slowly straightened up, my hair dripping rain into my eyes which by now must have looked wild and bloodshot, the tallest copper said, while reaching slowly for his truncheon, “Now then sir, what’s all that about then?”
I called Bill from the police station to come and vouch for me but he said he couldn’t on account of the fact I’d not taken any clothes around and besides it was raining and it was better he stay in bed so he didn’t catch a cold. The girls sent their regards.
Eventually the publisher came along and looked at me in the cell and raised his eyebrows and said in his plummy voice, “So the relaunch is shaping up well, I take it?”
A year ago, as it happens, I got a call from the US and the bloke said, “So, I hear you have something of a track record launching magazines? We wondered if you’d like to launch one for us in Australia. We think Playboy will go down really well there.”
I did think about it. For about a second.

to be continued...

I knew these two blokes back when I was a motoring journalist. They were both called Gerry and they were so old and infirm that we not unnaturally nicknamed them The Geriatrics.
Several car companies didn’t invite them on trips any longer because they were in the advanced stages of dementia. It wasn’t only that sometimes they became a touch forgetful; it was more serious than that. Sometimes they’d forget where they were, sometimes they’d forget who they were and sometimes they’d even forget they were driving a car, which of course can be dangerous.
On one infamous occasion we went to Italy to drive a new Fiat. The Geriatrics were invited and as usual they teamed up. If my memory serves me correctly - and it should as I’m not yet ready to join The Geriatrics’ Club - this was the new Fiat Mirafiori and it was one of the first mass-produced medium-priced cars to have a five-speed manual gearbox as standard.
The Geriatrics, both of whom needed the aid of walking sticks to get about, clambered into the Fiat and eventually found where the ignition key went and eventually fired the engine. Then there was a prolonged period of nothing much happening other than the engine revving hard and then falling again. Eventually one of the PR guys went over and poked his head in the window and asked pleasantly, “Got a problem chaps?”
“I’d say,” huffed Gerry, “can’t seem to get it in gear at all. Seems as if it’s already broken. Can’t say I’m surprised,” he grunted as he once again tried to slip it in gear, “after all, it is Italian.”
“Hmm,” said the PR man, trying his hardest not to laugh, “I think you’ll find you’re trying to change gear with your walking stick. The gearlever’s that one there, the one with Fiat written on the top.”
“Oh yes”, said Gerry, getting all confused, “I see which one you mean now. None too obvious though, is it?” And off they lurched.
Later in the day the news came in. While driving the wrong way up a one-way street (“back in ‘44”, said Gerry later that evening, “I took my tank right up that street and nobody said a single bloody word...”) the Gerry that was driving decided it was time to change up from fourth to fifth gear. Taking the Mirafiori to its limit in fourth, he snatched the gearlever (at least it wasn’t his walking stick this time) and with great gusto put it into...first gear.
Apparently, according to an Italian priest who happened to be walking along at the time and saw it all, the car stood on its nose, there was an horrendous noise as the transmission system was stripped out from underneath, cogs and all, and the whole collection of previously happily performing mechanicals was sent skittering up the street. The two Gerrys both smacked their foreheads on the windscreen - of course they weren’t wearing seatbelts - and were admitted to hospital suffering from severe concussion. Not too surprisingly that was the last press trip I ever saw them on.

to be continued...

One of the things about working in London on a car magazine is that you get to drive lots of really expensive cars. And I was doing all this when I was 21. Lording it around in Porsches, Jags, BMWs, Mercs and even Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. And if I had a Ferrari Boxer for the weekend, or a Porsche 944 convertible I’d get on the Channel ferry and pop down to the south of France for the weekend. Well, I have to say, it was brilliant.
Now, just to add some icing to this particular big fat cake the car companies took us journalists off on press trips. These were typically two to three days and they were always to exotic locations like St Moritz, Monte Carlo, Biarritz and even, on one memorable occasion, to West Africa.
The trouble was, I hated flying. I discovered I had aviophobia - the fear of flying. Of course, some of my experiences haven't helped. On my very first flight from London to Gothenberg in Sweden for the launch of the Saab Turbo, I dropped a lit cigarette (I can barely believe we all used to smoke on planes...) down the side of a plastic panel next to the fuselage whereupon it disappeared and then started to smoke profusely. When I pointed out the imminent conflagration to the hack sitting beside me he quickly tipped a glass of water down the back of the panel, only it was gin and tonic and so there was a genie-like puff of smoke followed by a roar of flame that singed the headlining and gave me a crew cut. Pandemonium ensued and it wasn't until two fire extinguishers had been employed that the fire was put out.
I was on a Britannia Airways jet that stalled as we were climbing after takeoff, which introduced me (very swiftly, it should be said), to oxygen masks and the howl of a diving plane.
Once on a twin-enginned Otter on a flight from Biggin Hill Aerodrome outside London to Scotland, I sat up front with Jim the pilot (somewhat worryingly there was no co-pilot) and we nearly hit a glider as we climbed through clouds. This was another evasive action situation and we dived like a Kamikaze, causing the hacks in the back to come tumbling down the plane, complete with their drinks. Three of them got wedged in the doorway before Jim pulled out of the dive and sent us up like the space shuttle, whereupon the hacks tumbled backwards. I heard one of them say, "Steady on old chap, nearly spilled me scotch!"
As we approached Dundee and slipped down out of the clouds, Jim said to me, "So, ever been to Dundee?" No, I said. Jim started looking around and then gave me a grim grin and said, "Ever seen a picture of it?" I realised we were lost. Eventually we swooped down to the M1motorway until we were close enough to follow the road signs to the airport and after negotiating several roundabouts we saw it.
When we landed the traffic controllers told Jim to turn right, which he immediately did, off the runway and tipping a wheel into a rabbit warren which caused the plane to lurch over and one wing to bury itself in the ground. We were rescued by a fleet of ambulances and sprayed with foam, which played havoc with my suit.
And once I was on a trip to Spain on a Dakota, circa 1952, which had apparently been restored to its former glory. Halfway there one of the engines burst into flames. I tapped the PR guy on the back and said, "Brian, the plane is on fire". "Of course it is, young fella, of course it is," he said and continued to drink.
Brian fought his way to the front of queue when we emergency landed somewhere in southern Spain, by which time the fire had gone out but the engine looked like it had been barbequed by an Englishman - we call it well done.

The general idea about press trips was that you got whisked away to these places in a private jet or business class on a jumbo (once Fiat booked a fleet of Boeing 747s to go around Europe picking up journalists before taking them to Cape Canaveral to watch some American space rocket taking off. No, I have no idea why...) and then you’d land, pick up the new cars which had not yet been launched to the public, team up with another journalist and drive to the five-star hotel where you would marvel at the grandness of the place. And of course, if you were of a particular bent - I think it’s called a thief – you’d squeeze just about everything you could into your luggage and take it home with you. You think I’m talking about the contents of the mini-bar but it went much further than that. There was a core of hacks who would nick everything they could get their paws on. After all, the hotel management was unlikely to complain. Far better they smiled and replaced all the nicked items than complain and never get the car company to book its horrendously expensive rooms again.
So, in went the contents of the mini-bar, and the usuals like the dressing gown with the hotel’s motif on it, and the towels too, plus all of the shampoos and soap and anything else in the bathroom, but so too would limited edition framed prints off the walls, pillows, expensive pens and stationary, and even ornate clocks. Once we were in St. Moritz and a group of us were talking about exactly this behaviour because the hotel we were staying in had its tasteful logo emblazoned on just about everything. I asked one hack if he’d had the towels away yet and he said in amazement, “The towels, old chap? I sat up most of the night unscrewing the bidet!”
Sometimes these hotels would have their own beaches or golf courses or fleet of private helicopters that would whisk you out over the bluest sea you’d ever seen. Sometimes these hotels would have been used in a James Bond film.
A friend of mine who worked for a women’s magazine told me about a trip she went on. A cosmetics company took a whole planeload of beauty journalists to Hong Kong for a week and ensconced them in a luxurious five-star hotel. They frolicked about in the hotel’s swimming pool and went shopping for days and then eventually went to an hour-long press conference about a new lipstick, before flying back.
Another journalist friend told me a similar story about the launch of a new men’s razor. The company took them aloft in Concorde, flew them around the Bay of Biscay at some ludicrous speed and told them how sharp the new blade was. Then they landed back at Heathrow.
No wonder razor blades cost so much.
The highlight of any trip, of course, was The Bribe. Back 30 years ago this started in a bit of a sledge-hammer way in that one car company started putting a bottle of whisky in the boot of every road test car they lent out to journalists. Now, I don’t know about you but I’ve heard drink-driving is not a good idea. Eventually some PR person must have realised this too and figured it probably wasn’t sending out the right message.
So they started giving out other presents. These initially ranged from umbrellas with the company name on them, to sweaters, similarly adorned with the company logo, baseball caps, cashmere scarves and even on one occasion pairs of boxer shorts, again with the company logo stuck all over them. If you dropped your trousers it looked like you were wearing the front grille of a Honda, or whatever it was.
Then someone really upped the ante with solar powered calculators. This was in the days when a calculator cost more than a Rolls-Royce and a solar powered one, well, that was rocket science, that was. Then there were digital watches which were almost as expensive as a Ferrari, and cameras (though not digital cameras because they hadn’t been invented then, or at least if they had they would not only have been the price but also the size of a Ferrari).
Then the game went up a gear or two and soon they were giving away hand-made leather jackets, laptop computers (no-one could afford them back then), hand-made luxury fountain pen sets with your name engraved on them, and a selection of expensive wines. All of the aforementioned were given to me on just one trip that lasted over a week. We got a different present every day. On the bus to the airport I asked one of the other hacks what he thought about the car and he said, “You know old chap, I don’t think I got to drive it...”. I think he was too busy unwrapping the bribes.
Just occasionally the carmakers didn’t give bribes. It wasn’t often that there was nothing, but sometimes I think they just felt the free trip, excellent food and wine, and luxurious accommodation were sufficient. Now, the thing with The Bribe was that it was given to us in one of two ways. Sometimes it would be in the hotel room, sitting on the table, all nicely wrapped and with a little welcome card. Other times the suspense would be heightened because they’d leave it until the end of the trip and then suddenly produce it with a flourish amid much cheering and hand clapping from the happy hacks.
And sometimes there would be nothing and the atmosphere on the coach back to the airport would be as sombre as if someone had died on the test drive.
Sometimes car companies would take us to Biarritz just to show off a new chrome grille. You think I’m kidding? It's true. Once they took a load of us out to Africa because they had a new, deep black colour scheme. See? Africa. Black, geddit? It was so stupid because at the time there was no unleaded petrol in the dark continent so the car company had to ship out a load of it so the cars could be refuelled on our test drive. People who worry about the environment and want to know what to do about it should probably begin here.
The thing was, there were so many car trips that on average I went away about every two weeks. Some of the hacks reckoned they got off one plane and then got straight on another to go somewhere else. Of course, people outside the industry always said to me, “God! You’re going to St Moritz? You are so lucky! Yes, you are!” But I didn’t think so. I mean, look at it like this - there you are in one of the world’s best hotels in one of the world’s top dream locations, but you’re there for only two days and you’re there with a bunch of people you’d never choose to go on holiday with.
On one trip to Spain I went on, the PR man was an ex-motoring journalist who some of us knew pretty well. As PR people go he was quite likeable. He told us younger hacks there was no Bribe and so we decided to play a trick on the older hacks - the ones who traditionally were used to getting The Bribe.
Over dinner that night in Spain one of the old duffers whose nick-name was Bunty looked around the table all wide-eyed and then said in a low voice that he’d last used whilst leading a commando raid on a Nazi missile bunker in Norway in 1942, “Psst! Can’t seem to find the present. Not in me room.”
I said, “What? But it’s in your room.”
“In our room?” said about 10 of them in unison.
“Yes, I said, “in the corner near the big window.”
There was silence for a moment and then...
“Ah!” says Bunty, “of course. Thought so. Spotted it earlier. Right. Good.”
The next morning us younger hacks made sure we checked out early and then we all got on the bus. Around five minutes later all of the older hacks came marching out of the hotel, each clutching the large rubber trees that had been growing in pots in their rooms. You know, they were stealing them. I saw the manager looking all goggle-eyed but he never said anything, I think it’s because he was so shocked that a bunch of arrogant English journalists could nick the hotel’s rubber plants just like that on masse, but also that they could do it so blatantly. They each clutched their plants in one arm as they signed their hotel bills with the other hand. I reckon that the manager also thought, well, these people have paid a fortune to use our hotel so what’s a few rubber trees?
Meanwhile, us younger journalists sat on the bus trying hard to keep straight faces as these fools brought on their tall rubber trees, cursing and grumbling as they struggled to ease them through the coach’s narrow doors.
“Ha!”, one of them said to me, “forgot yours did you?” And they all started laughing out loud at my inexperience. We laughed along with them, we laughed so loud it hurt and we continued laughing long after the old hacks had stopped. I think they thought we were mad. Of course, once we all got back to Heathrow and they strolled through Customs like a moving rain forest the game was up.
“Hang on a minute there, sir,” said a Customs officer, “you can’t bring that bloody tree in here.”
“I’ll have you know this is a present!” shouted Bunty as he was ushered into a back room by uniformed officers and apparently subjected to an examination that afterwards had him walking funny for weeks.
Another time, I went on a press trip to Italy. On the way from the airport the PR man fell asleep on the bus. When we got to the hotel he strode to the head of the queue, booked in before us and as the tail-enders signed in he walked past in his swimming trunks, towel draped over his shoulders, headed for the sun-drenched pool. We joined him later and paddled around for a while as waiters brought us cocktails, delivering them direct to our floating lilos. It must have been hell walking around in wet trousers all day.
In the afternoon we all followed PR Man as he went to lie on the hotel’s private beach where he spreadeagled himself in the sun like a staked sacrifice.
After three days of this I got a bit bored and I went up to him, my shadow cutting his sun and causing him to swear vociferously. I said, “Benny, when are we driving the cars?” He brought his head up off the towel and shaded his eyes, which were in any case hidden behind massive impenetrably dark sunglasses whose arms were engraved with his company’s logo in thick gold. “I think they’ve got some here somewhere,” he grunted, then lay back down with a mighty huff and muttered tiredly, “be my guest.” The only thing he really worked hard on for the four days was his tan.

One of the editors I worked with ran a wine magazine, though saying that is a bit like saying the Americans knew what they were doing in Iraq. Yes, it was what us journalists call a right old mess.
Bert was a wino first, an editor second which meant he was absolutely great at opening a bottle of wine, sniffing it, telling you all about it and above all, drinking it. He was less successful at running a magazine, which demands rather more than just drinking all day (okay, yes, yes, some journalists do manage both...).
Bert worked with two girls and a man called Chipper who was a theatre actor. One of the girls didn’t appear to speak at all, had her hair permanently hanging down all over her eyes and would grunt when you challenged her with a good morning. We called her Miss Thing, not because she was obnoxious or full of herself (though she was all that too) but because we weren’t sure what else to call her. Under her desk (they all worked around four big desks pushed together) she stuffed everything she wasn’t using. I mean everything. I don’t know exactly what was under there but it was rumoured that one of the down-and-outs (I think they were attracted by the wine fumes) that normally hung around outside the office had his home there. That could well have been right; it had all the hallmarks of a box city. As far as I’m aware nobody ever ventured to the centre of the stuff, that would have been harder than discovering the source of the Ganges, so no-one knew exactly what was in there.
The other girl, Clara, spoke with a whole bag of plums in her mouth – well that’s what it sounded like. She always arrived at work hung-over. She spent the first half of any day with her head on the desk groaning, or rushing to the loo. Sometimes in the afternoons she would perk up sufficiently to call one of her numerous boyfriends. Her conversations, spoken at high volume so no one else in the open-plan office was in any doubt about what she’d been doing, went like this.
“Yaa, that was sooooo good last night, oh yaa. Can’t hardly sit down meself. Ohhh yes, bet you are. Ohhh yes, a fine upstanding boy you are,” and then she’d make everyone jump as she brayed like a donkey and reached out, clutching wildly at a half-drunk bottle of wine, (of which there were always plenty on the desks) and glugged down a good couple of mouthfuls before returning to the phone and saying, “Ohhh yes indeed, I’m a naughty daddy’s girl. Spank me? Oh yes, spank me like a monkey. Whooooaaa!”
I never worked out what she meant but I haven’t been able to look a monkey in the eye since.
Chipper was a short barrel-chested man with a frizz of black hair and a fine, deep baritone voice which he couldn’t stop using. We would hear him arriving in his diminutive Ford Fiesta, his large frame squeezed in as if he were trapped. We heard him not because the car was noisy but because he’d always be singing a verse or two from The Mikado, Madam Butterfly or The Pirates of Penzance. His singing echoed along the street, drowning out the noise of buses and diesel taxis and causing bystanders to stop and stare. At the last count his voice had caused three accidents outside, one of them a serious pile-up, which several ambulances, a doctor and the police attended.
Chipper would sing coming up the stairs, sometimes tap-dancing up and down the steps for long minutes, then he’d make a grand entrance, flinging open the double doors, getting down on one knee, arms flung out wide, waiting for the applause, which never came. He’d sing in the gents, he’d open up at inopportune moments, like when one of us was on the phone interviewing someone, or when all was blissfully quiet in the late afternoon. In the middle of serious weekly meetings he’d suddenly lapse into verse, or quote something from Shakespeare’s Richard III, strutting around the meeting room, much to the alarm of Porks The Fat Publisher who Chipper once backed up against the wall, face-to-face, belly-to-belly quoting lines from Hamlet before letting the ashen faced fat man go and sitting down again and booming, “well, let’s be ‘aving you, mateys. It is a fair day indeed to make some muzoola! Let the action begin! Hurrah!”. Sometimes Chipper would come up to your desk, drag up a chair, put a foot up on it and as if dressed like a pirate, would regale you, with rolling eyes and slashes of an imaginary sword, with complete full-volume renditions of the moment the pirate king entered, stage left, act three. Chipper either supplemented his acting career – which truth to tell was hardly a threat to Olivier, or even Oliver Reed -  with his wine writing career, or it was the other way around. I’m not sure if he or even his accountant had a handle on that.   
Growing in the middle of the four desks they all shared and had pushed together was a towering Everest of paper, old food cartons, editorial pieces for the next issue (or the one that had long gone), office phones, items of clothing, dirty dishes and clothes, empty and half empty wine bottles, wine glasses of all shapes and sizes and, as we would be reminded at regular intervals, Bert’s house keys.
Bert had a French car. It had the steering wheel on the wrong side, which meant he regularly scraped other cars, walls, posts, bollards, and on one occasion in the height of summer he snagged a wheelchair belonging to an old blind man who was patiently waiting at the side of the road. The blind chap was taken on an impromptu high speed tour of Richmond and surrounds, attached to the back bumper of Bert’s erratically driven car. So the story ran, when Bert stopped at a wine bar to meet some chums, including Chipper, the sunglass-wearing wheelchair man managed to get himself free which was momentarily a good thing until he realised he was on a steep slope – the boat ramp at Twickenham as it happened – and found himself travelling downhill swiftly, the dark brown waters of the Thames coming to meet him. Fortunately Chipper, who was waiting outside the wine bar, was able to use his booming actor’s voice to great effect as he saw the wheelchair and puzzled old man on board heading for the river and shouted to Bert, pointing, “There she blows, matey! Better be quick! Old codger on death row!” and Bert turned, saw what was happening and with only a moment’s hesitation sprinted down the ramp, catching the wheel chair in time but unfortunately unable to stop his by now slippery feet taking him and the wheelchair and the old blind man into the water. Chipper ran down too and managed to pull them all to safety, their clothes dripping wet, the old man hyper-ventilating with shock. “I say old chap,” said Chipper, “it’s no day to go swimming. Got to be careful at Twickers, don’t ya know, tidal, very tidal indeed, tra-la-laaaaa! Now, Bert, introduce me to this friend of yours. Notice you arrived together.”
Every day at 3.15pm even Chipper would go quiet as we all waited with bated breath for the timed alarm to go off on Bert’s house keys. It only chimed for three minutes. Just before the beeps started on the dot at 3.15, an air of excitement invaded the office; a frisson of electricity seemed to be crackling in the air. Money changed hands, bets were laid. Even Porks managed to heave himself up off his chair and come and peep over the partitions, sandwich in hand. At 3.15 they were off! Chipper directing operations, Miss Thing, Clara and Bert diving into the desk mountain, scattering debris every which way, the beeps often sounding tantalisingly close. But, as usual, three minutes later the beeps stopped. The keys were never found.
“Sorry old chap,” said an exhausted Chipper putting his arm around a crestfallen Bert, “have to stay with mumsy again tonight. Them’s the breaks, old fellow. Tra-la-laaaaa!”

One of my bosses was, well, rather fat.
Now, don’t go closing the book with a sigh because you think I’m a fattist. Though I do think there’s far too much these days of blaming one’s girth and roly-poly gait on some kind of divine intervention (from the devil, I assume...). Most times you’re porky because you’re eating too much, drinking too much, eating the wrong stuff, not running (or even walking) and spending all your time blaming fast food outlets who apparently stuff your face with their wares without you hardly noticing, well until you get on the scales and then you can’t even see your feet, much less read the read-out.
I say this because The Fat Publisher, who was variously called Porky, Porks, The Porkini, Pork Chop and The Chop (but seldom to his face, as it happens...) was a man who lived to eat. When we’d go for a lunch he’d order a Chinese for five. Once I looked at him and the other editor I was with and said, “who are we waiting for?” and he looked at me and said, “no-one, why?”
Once I was driving somewhere with him – he had a great big fat Mercedes-Benz – and he saw a fat woman waddling along and he slowed down, pudgy arm resting on the open window, thick gold watch glimmering in the sun, and said, “Jeez, look at her, will you” and I thought he must fancy her, what with her being fat like him and I was just searching for some appropriate comment to make when he continued, “how she can go out like that is beyond me. I mean, look at the state of her.” I was, as the English say, gobsmacked.
He had a boat. A big cruiser he berthed at Isleworth on the Thames. He thought he knew a lot about boats, which maybe he did, but he was no expert on tides. Porky spent an afternoon one weekend messing about on the boat and when he’d finished he lashed it tight to the bollards or whatever they are called and went home. Now, the Thames rises and falls every day by several metres. Trouble was, the tide was out and when it came streaming back in the boat rose with it, but it could only rise so far, because it was held fast tighter than the waistband of Porky’s trousers.
The upshot was, the river came onboard and the boat sank, sort of. It could only go down so far because it was tied tight. Of course when the tide went down again the boat looked alright, only it was full of water.
One Christmas we decided to run a competition. The prize was a turkey, a big one. The question was, how much does La Porkini weigh, only we told him it was a competition to work out how much a Mercedes-Benz weighed. To find out The Porks’ weight I arranged for him to drive me to a vehicle weigh station. He sniggered about this. “You know, only you and me will know the weight.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Thing is,” he said, “I rather fancy that turkey. Succulent, tasty, mmm. How big did you say it is?”
So, we got the car on the weighbridge and of course I already knew the weight of a Mercedes-Benz and I knew what I weighed so I just subtracted those figures and came up with The Porkster’s weight.
As we were driving away he said, a greedy gleam in his piggy eyes, “You know, I can almost smell that bird roasting.”
Every summer he took the boat across to Spain. He went to the same resort year in year out and when he came back we’d all hear him on the phone to, “Manuel, Manuel, is that you, por favoure? Speak up, mon gringo, I can hardly esta-hable what you are conswame. Yes, yes, it is I. Yes, the paella was excellentay. Oh I did, yes, two extra portions, gracias, which is why I am on la telephone calling votre hacienda. The bill, Manuel, I think there may be, how do you say, an error.”
Of course this went on for a long time and provided us with many hours of entertainment.
While on holiday one year Porks was fiddling with the parked boat and spilt some fuel on the jetty. He peered at it as it snaked across the berth, his eyes squinting against the smoke from his cigar and he was so surprised at the speed of its liquid progress towards his boat that he dropped the cigar and poof, up went the fuel. He got up and, as he told it, ran for his boat, which must have been a sight to see. Apparently the fire got there just before he leaped aboard and quickly spread (that’s the fire, not Porks...). He beat at it but to no avail and soon the boat which once had been so sodden lightning couldn’t have torched it, was blazing brighter than a Greek funeral pyre out on the harbour.
Porks leapt over the side of the boat to the safety of his rubber dinghy. Which sank.

After three years of Golden Weddings, funerals, school plays and inquests I thought I should challenge my young brain. So I left and got a job in London on a car magazine.
I was 21.
I got a flat in Hounslow with Deak, a friend-of-a-friend. Hounslow is nearer to the runways at Heathrow than the departure gates. When planes come over, the vortex sometimes rips tiles off your roof and everything in your house rattles. At first I thought it was an earthquake, until I remembered where I was.
If you’re on the phone when the 5.15 from Karachi comes over - and you have to remember that a plane comes over every two minutes - you have to either suspend the conversation or raise your voice so the person on the other end of the line has to keep holding the receiver away from their ear as you shout above the roar of a brace of Pratt & Whitneys.
If you’re a plane watcher, living in Hounslow is a dream come true, the ultimate location. If you’re deaf it can’t be bad either, though you’d have to be wondering why all those roof tiles keep coming off. But if you’re a sane person, Hounslow is one of the worst places to live in Christendom.
Deak was a Flight Controller and he was a card-carrying nutter, a real gold-leafed, award-winning, utter and complete bonkers nutcase.
On the day I arrived, all naive from the country, two policemen were in the flat questioning him about a man he’d found stabbed outside the corner shop. The man later died in hospital. When I mentioned this to my friend in the local pub he looked into his beer before looking up at me with a frown. “You know Deak spent time inside for knifing a guy in the Army, don’t you?”
One day I heard on the radio that a British Airways plane had landed, chopping off the tail fin of a plane already on the ground taxiing for take-off. When I got home I mentioned it to Deak and he said, “I told that stupid bloody American to move his bloody plane. I told the enquiry and I’m telling you - he would not listen!”
Whenever Meryl Streep came on the TV Deak’d start cheering. Really cheering, like he was at a live concert.  And if there was a snake on the TV he’d vomit there and then, on the carpet. I’d scan the TV Times and Radio Times at the beginning of the week for any wildlife programs, or films that had Meryl in them. If there was one with Meryl and snakes I arranged a night out.
Deak also had an unhealthy fascination with guns and violence. When there were race riots in Brixton he went out and bought a baseball bat which he kept by the door. I said, “Deak, Brixton’s an hour away by train.” He said, “They can get trains, can’t they, those people down in Brixton?”
Quite why they would board a train, get off at Hounslow West, walk half a mile, cross the Great West Road and then come up our cul-de-sac and batter our door down I had no idea. But Deak was ready.
The old woman next door had a small dog. She used to put it out every morning at 5am. The dog, who presumably didn't want to be out in the cold, always started to bark straight away and it always woke me up (unlike Australians, Brits like to sleep until at least 7am...). Deak realised the barking dog drove me mad so he started barking in his room. Not joke barking. Really, scary dog-like barking. He practised and practised until I thought, really thought, he had the dog in there with him. Deak’s barking got so good that when next-door’s dog was put out it didn’t bark anymore, it just cocked its head, listened, and shivered in terror. A bit like me actually.
Deak worked shifts, which meant he’d sometimes come in at three in the morning. He’d go into his room, turn the sound system right up and start singing along to it. What with that and the barking dog, it was driving me almost as insane as he was. I told him, “Deak, if you want to switch your sound system on at three in the morning why don’t you get a pair of headphones so I can’t hear it?” Fair enough he said and the next night when he came home at three he turned the sound system on and put the headphones on his head. Then he started to sing along at the top of his voice. Of course he couldn’t hear me banging on the door, so I just walked into his room. He had his back to me, singing along to Abba’s Dancing Queen at the top of his voice, his head snapping side to side with the beat. I tapped him on the shoulder. He screamed at the top of his lungs, turned around and screamed some more. I slapped him hard and walked out.
Two days later the toilet cistern went berserk and wouldn’t stop flushing. Deak’d had an American airhostess to stay for a few days and I think she’d stashed some cocaine or something in the cistern. Anyway, by the time she left it was just flowing away non-stop. Deak went to work and called me at my office (no one had mobile phones then. Can you believe that? It was 1982) and I could hear planes in the background and someone chattering on a radio.
“Mate," he said, "what make is that toilet?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s a Royal Doulton or something.”
“We need to know because the -” Then I heard him saying, “Okay, okay, just hold it a minute! Jesus!” and then he was back on. “Those bloody captains. Give them a seven-four-seven and they think they’re God.”
“Deak, don’t you think you should attend to the plane? We can discuss the toilet cistern later.”
“Nah. We’ve got to get it figured out, the carpet’ll get soaked.”
I could hear the captain of the jumbo shouting in the background and then the phone was banged down again and Deak was saying to him, “Look, I’m busy. Get it? Busy! Just wait a goddam minute.”
Then he was back.
“So, what about if you go home lunchtime and turn the water off? I think the main stop-cock is in the street.”
Before I could say anything else I hear screaming in the background and then Deak is banging the phone down again and screaming back at the pilot. I put the phone in its cradle and cut him off. Somewhere in the skies above Heathrow a Boeing 747 with 300 people on board was circling, running low on fuel, waiting for Deak to sort out a leaking toilet cistern in Hounslow.
Deak told me that one day he was flying to America on a full Pan Am 747 and he knew one of the airhostesses so he asked her if he could go and visit the crew in the cockpit. In those days, pre-Twin Towers, you could do that. She told him that was fine, so in he went.
The plane was on autopilot of course and Deak discovered that everyone up front was asleep. That’s everyone. I asked Deak what he did and he looked at me with some surprise and said, "Well, I closed the door very quietly so I didn't disturb them."
He told me about another time this happened on a flight from the US to London, the flight crew all asleep, and the plane overshot Heathrow and started heading for Cornwall. Somewhere over the Scilly Isles, well off the coast, a buzzer sounded and woke the crew up. After a bit of confusion they turned it around and took the passengers on to London.
Eventually mad-Deak got the sack for fighting during a night shift. He and the only other controller on duty that night were apparently rolling around on the floor going at it hammer and tongs. Meanwhile planes were circling Heathrow trying to keep out of each other’s way.
When I moved out of the flat after a year of this stupidity and bought my first place just across the road I thought I was out of there for good. It was winter when I moved in so it was dark outside. I put a box down and turned around and there he was, standing silently in the open doorway, a full moon seeming to rest on his shoulder in the blackness of the night.
“And you thought you could desert The Prince of Darkness?” he said and then laughed madly. I nervously made small chat as my heart raced. Eventually he left and I heard later that he’d moved out of London and gone to East Anglia. I assume that by now he’s safely locked up somewhere. Mind you, knowing The Prince of Darkness, he’s probably hiding in the hold of a Boeing 747, slowly loosening a bolt that holds a wing on, or something like that, a maniacal grin on his face.
Look, I can’t help it if you bought this book at the airport terminal, maybe you should have bought a Stephen King instead.

to be continued...

When I left school I got a job on a weekly newspaper and my first writing assignment was to go to the local steelworks which were so massive they stretched for six miles along the valley floor.
The editor had heard that the rough-tough men of steel had rescued a stray budgie that’d been flying around the strip mill. Some union shop-steward pushed a big red button and stopped the mill, losing several millions pounds in the process and I think momentarily sending the UK economy into deficit.
The steel men fashioned a cage of thick strip steel bars for the budgie, and then they started the mill again. A nice little story that one and because the editor liked to give everybody a By-line (this is your name on the story) I got my first and on the train home that evening I just kept looking at it and looking at it, finding it hard to grasp that it was me who’d written that story.
The editor liked to use the words ‘bid, boost and bingo’ in as many combinations and in as many headlines as he could. He also finished every headline with an exclamation mark. My story was entitled Bingo! Budgie Bids for Freedom! (To my mind his all-time best headline was Bid to Boost Biggest Bingo in Blaenau Borough!)
The following month when things were quiet he called me in to his office and asked me what I’d got on. Nothing, I said, so he said, “Okay, go up the steelworks and see how that budgie’s doing. Take Claude with you.”
Claude, the paper’s photographer, wasn’t a hard worker. Once we were driving along in his dark blue Ford Escort van when we saw a bus mount the kerb and crash into a bus stop, scattering people in its path. “Uh-oh”, said Claude, slamming on the brakes and executing a quick three-point turn. “Too interesting for us.” He changed up into second, then third and as I stared at him we sped away from the scene, the urgent engine screaming, echoing off the mining valley’s small stone houses.
Claude did like to go along to schools and photograph pupils running around doing sports, though looking back on it now he was always most keen – his eyes fairly glittered, if I correctly recall – when he was photographing young girls gambolling around in their skimpy sports clothes. Funnily enough not all of the pictures – especially the close-ups – found their way into the paper. I suspect by now he is either serving time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, already has done, or is receiving weekly counselling.  
The company’s photographers had a secret competition to see how many times they could get their Ford vans in the pictures that appeared in the group’s newspapers. This often demanded real skill. The best one was when we went to interview a Golden Wedding couple. I asked them the usual questions (“what’s the secret to your long marriage?”) and they gave me the usual answers (“give and take”) and then Claude went into action. He made them stand against the window. “Claude”, I said, “the light...”.
“Lovely,” he said softly and moved them at an angle. I stood beside him. He managed to get all of the Ford Escort van in the picture, there in the background, out on the road, one floor down. But because of the light behind them the couple were just shadows.
The editor used it on the front page with the headline - Shadowy Couple in ‘Give and Take’ Bid to Boost Marriage!

to be continued...

In every young man’s life there comes a time when the call of the wild is irresistible. Yes, I wanted a pet dog. I pestered my parents non-stop for months. In fact, thinking about it now, I probably should have become a political lobbyist when I left school because I used every trick in the book to get a dog under our roof and ultimately it was a very successful campaign. I wore them down with my persistent demands, my moody silences, my wide-eyed teary pleading. I think at one stage I stood poised on the roof of the house and threatened to jump. Looking back I’m not sure Tom was convinced I’d die, us living in a bungalow. At least I assume that’s why he went back inside for a cup of tea.
But eventually they caved in. I got a newborn mongrel from a friend. I called this dog Tingha after the Tingha & Tucker show on the BBC. Tingha & Tucker were two koala bears. Well, actually they were two hand puppets with a man’s hand up their arse and they never spoke or uttered any sound, at least not as far as I can remember. Well you wouldn’t would you?
This dog Tingha was a complete and utter nutter.
Today I’m sure there are no end of dog psychology or advanced dog training courses he could have been enrolled in but back then I just accepted the fact that he was going to turn around and bite me on the hand every time I tried to stop him mounting Linda Lotion, the girl who lived two doors up.
I was in love with Linda Lotion and yes, that was her real name. Linda’s parents were actors and she was the coolest, most confident person I’d ever met. One day she said to me, “I want to introduce you to Simon & Garfunkel.” I thought they must be her next-door neighbours.
Once I knew who they were I went out and bought all their albums, not because I liked them but because I loved Linda Lotion. Well, I was only 10. Even now when I hear The Sound of Silence or Homeward Bound I’m back in the winter, feeling the snow and the cold, getting on a bus to go to the shops to see if I could find another S&G album, but really hoping I’d bump into Linda. Of course I never did, even though I walked up and down the High Street for hours until my toes were so cold I couldn’t feel them. It didn’t occur to me to phone her - well, actually it did, but I had no idea what I’d say. Besides, I didn’t have her number.
One day I saw her kissing my best friend Graham in the school playground.
Anyway, I digress.
At first I thought Tingha was just playing doggy games every time he attached himself to Linda and humped her up the street. She thought it was great fun and squealed incessantly as they po-goed along.
But I must have been growing up because one particular day as Tingha tried to mount Linda in the high street in front of the butchers I somehow knew that this was not acceptable behaviour. Of course it could have been a frowning red-faced Mr Jones rapping on the window with his meat cleaver that made me see things this way, I can’t remember for sure.
Linda appeared to have no such concerns. She squealed with delight as Tingha salivated all over her neck. She certainly never got that excited with me.
Anyway, Tingha went from bad to worse. One day, in his quest to find more girls on which to practice his sexual favours he leapt out through our front door, shattering glass everywhere. He was not seen for a week. Everybody on the estate heard him though. It was like the Hound of the Baskervilles out there. All night he was either barking or howling. Eventually he came back looking completely knackered and slept and snored for three solid days, not even waking to eat. I know men like this, but a dog?
The climax came – as it were - when my mother was having a Tupperware party.
Tingha pranced into the lounge and as if the music had stopped, all the women sat down rather smartly. They’d heard about Tingha. The dog took a look around and then leapt onto the white shagpile rug in front of the gas fire and proceeded to give it a right good seeing-to, right there, right in front of the Tupperware party housewives. He humped it out through the kitchen - at one stage he had it up against the kitchen wall and was very vigorous with it - and then he took it out into the garden where he rogered it until it was in tatters.
Two days later a man in a shiny polyester suit came up the driveway, knocked on the door then came in and collected all of the plastic bowls, snap-tight lids and bendy cutlery. Tupperware had sacked my mother; her selling technique of having a dog walk in and perform sexual acts with a shagpile rug somehow didn’t sit comfortably with what Tupperware was all about.
Eventually, one grey winter’s morning, a big white RSPCA van parked outside. Tingha was marched out and locked in the back and I shivered inside the house and peered out from behind a lace curtain as the dog was driven away. He looked forlornly out of the meshed back window.
Years later I bumped into my old friend Graham and we went out for a drink and we had a few too many and he said to me, “You know, funny thing about Linda.”
They were married by then.
“What’s that then?” I said, taking a swig of my beer.
Graham stared into his glass and swirled his beer around and then looked at me, frowned and said, “She only really enjoys sex when I bark and howl at her.”

Three

Tom had a thing for cars. Old cars. Cars that were never really very good. Okay, we didn’t have a lot of money when we were young and there were four kids and that must have been expensive, but still, Tom didn’t see the point in spending money on motors.
First of all we had a Morris Traveller. That’s the estate car with the wooden struts along the side - the ones that rot. The Traveller took us up to the Yorkshire Moors but it didn’t bring us back. The clutch plate seized in the middle of nowhere.
It was like being in Wuthering Heights what with the wind whipping the heather and storm clouds scudding across the sky and any moment I half expected Emily Bronte to rap on the side window and ask if we were alright. As the wind buffeted the car, mum said, “You’ll have to thumb a lift.” Tom groaned and thumped the dashboard several times (which was not sensible because it was hard steel back then, not soft plastic) and moaned, “I’ll never get a lift! We’re in the middle of bloody nowhere!” None of us said anything, but the little one started to cry and we all imagined being out there all night, or maybe even longer.
Tom did thumb a lift and eventually got one, even though we were miles from anywhere.
An hour or two later a truck turned up with Tom in the passenger seat. The truck driver towed us to the nearest town and they put a new clutch plate in the Traveller, but not before Tom had bored the mechanic silly with a diatribe against the workers at Morris who Tom said should stick to something they knew something about. He never explained exactly what that something was. I’d like to ask him one day. I’m just waiting for him to calm down. You might think that sounds silly but...
...back when I was 10 we were all sitting at the dinner table having our evening meal and Tom grabbed the tomato ketchup bottle and gave it a vigorous shake. Trouble was, someone hadn’t put the screw top on properly and when Tom shook the bottle it came off and a geyser of thick red ketchup shot up in the air. We all looked up, including Tom, following its liquid trajectory, and then down it came, splattering on Tom’s face, slapping in his hair. I think my sister was the first to burst into laughter but after that it was open season. My brother rolled off his chair and fell under the table, baying like a hyena. I banged my forehead on my dinner plate I was so out of control, my mother was crying and my other sister was thumping the table. Tom sat there, a ketchup-dripping glower on his face. He got up, threw the bottle against the wall where it exploded, wounding the wall with red sauce, and then off he stormed, his feet beating the stairs.
Even today whenever the story comes up we all burst out laughing, all except Tom who still storms out of the room, some 30 years after it happened.
I think maybe now you can understand my reluctance to ask Tom about the men who built the Morris Traveller’s defective clutch plate.
Next we had a cream-coloured Ford Prefect. One weekend Tom made the mistake of putting several tons of garden slabs in the boot, and it was never the same again. I believe he thought he’d save some money by not having the slabs delivered by truck but in the event we ended up with a car whose nose reached for the stars and whose rear suspension no longer suspended very much at all.
The only other thing I remember about the Prefect is that it had a top speed of 60 mph and that downhill Tom regularly reached it, seemingly by gritting his teeth and rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat, coaxing it, willing it to go faster. It never did, but it gave rise to my mother’s expression, “it was going 60 miles an hour” for anything that was travelling at high speed.
Tom’s next move was into a Ford Thames Trader. The Trader was a van but with windows on the sides, so this was the first people-mover you ever saw, though in those days of course it was known as a camper van.
Tom set to work on the Thames and soon there was a chipboard table in there, between the two sets of seats. He unbolted the two-seater bench and turned it around so it faced the three-seater bench at the back of the van. The chipboard table went in the middle so we could all sit there and eat our meals.
I should explain that the suspension on the Thames Trader was hard. Well, hard is not doing it justice, to be honest. More like rock-hard. Of course it had to be, after all it was supposed to be a van. The thing was, because of the hard springs if the journey was anything over 10 miles the table used to shake itself loose from the hinges and eventually it would collapse onto the floor with an almighty bang.
Us kids used to watch it intently as it vibrated and as the speed increased the vibration also increased until the noise in the back was deafening. Tom would shout back over the roar of the unsuppressed engine and the chattering chipboard table, “Hold the table! Hold it down! Jesus! Hold it!” But it always collapsed sooner or later and up front Tom would groan out loud and say, “Now I’ve got to bloody well screw it all back together again. Oh Jesus!”
The engine sat under the van and between the two front seats and the heat from the engine cover was terrific. In the summer months, being inside the Trader was like travelling across the Gobi Desert. I believe you could have cooked bacon and eggs on the metal cover in about 30 seconds. If you had a mind to, you could unlatch the engine cover and fling it open and lie down and watch the road down below fly past. I used to imagine I was on a Lancaster bomber on a low-flying mission over Germany. In fact, we only had it open once because Tom ran over a hedgehog which got scooped up by the wheel and flung up through the open engine, narrowly missing us kids but impaling itself on its own spikes on the headlining of the roof. Tom had to pull over and he cursed and cursed.
“Bloody hedgehogs,” he bellowed as he unscrewed the poor animal from the roof lining, “shouldn’t be allowed on the bloody road. Jesus!”
“Well,” huffed my mother, “you really were going at least 60 miles an hour!”
The very back seat was higher than all the other seats, I think because of the hard, raised rear suspension, and so anyone who sat there was as obvious as the Pope on a tour. Thanks to the super-hard springs, if you were on the rear seat when the Thames Trader was going at full pelt you couldn’t help but bounce up and down, even on a relatively flat road surface. When it became bumpy it was like riding a bucking horse. Sometimes, because we were just kids, we’d all cram onto the bouncing seat for fun.
One day we were all sitting there, all four of us, and we were on the motorway and we hit a patch of not so much bumpy but I suppose undulating road and the Thames started bouncing. Up front Tom shouted above the blare of the engine, “Hold on!” and fought with the steering wheel as my mother clutched the sides of her seat. In the back we were bouncing like there was no tomorrow and the chipboard table chittered like some wild animal.
A car coming past us in the fast lane slowed. It was full of youngsters; I reckon they were all in their late teens. All five of them were looking at us and pointing and then the three in the back saw us bobbing up and down - there was nothing we could do to stop it – and then they all started bobbing up and down too, and then the driver and passenger also started bobbing. They kept level with us for about five minutes, much to our embarrassment, and then Tom saw them and started to accelerate.
As they came alongside us again Tom started doing the rocking thing to somehow make the van go faster.
The youngsters started pointing at Tom and then they all started rocking and bouncing, bouncing and rocking. Neither of our vehicles could go any faster so they kept abreast of us for maybe 10 miles. Eventually us kids slid down onto the floor.
“What the hell’re you kids doing?” shouted Tom from up front as he struggled with the steering. “Get back up on that bloody seat. People will think there’s something bloody well wrong with you!”
Tom eventually realised the Thames didn’t have any more speed and he groaned and let up on the accelerator and the car sped off up the road. The passengers kept bouncing until we couldn’t see them anymore.
Another day we were going to the shops and us kids must have been fighting in the back and Tom shouted, “Shut up in the back there, you bloody kids! All day you’ve been whining. Shut up!”
So we did.
We all sat there quiet as mice while Tom’s temper sizzled up front.
We drove into a car park. In those days there were loads of car parks on waste ground. You paid some bloke and he raised a bent metal pipe and you went in and drove around looking for a space.
So there we were driving around this car park and Tom muttering about paying his money and not finding anywhere to park. All four of us kids were on the high back seat, as far away from Tom as it was possible to be. He was driving slowly and eventually mum spotted a parking space and Tom grumbled and said, “I’ll never get it in there. Jesus, it’s impossible!”
But he fought with the gear lever which always made the most amazing groaning and whining and crunching noises when Tom was trying to make it go in any direction. Eventually he let out a great cry as if he was murdering someone and banged it into reverse. Us kids all turned and looked over the seat back, down behind us. There was a woman in a Mini right there, looking up at us with terrified eyes as the Trader started to jolt back towards her.
From the height of the Trader it appeared to us that she was in a toy car. We started to go back and I saw her put her hand on the horn but it was a Mini so it didn’t blare it just peeped and Tom didn’t hear it over the sound of the Trader’s engine. Of course, he couldn’t see the diminutive Mini because it was way below the Trader’s rear end. We all kept staring out the back as Tom inched us closer and closer.
The woman, who was rather fat for a Mini, was struggling with the door now and got it open and got out of the car just as the Trader made contact, the rear bumper crunching against her windscreen and shattering the glass. Tom was looking back but he still couldn’t see the car, which by now he’d started to push backwards.
The woman came up to Tom’s window and rapped on the glass. Tom looked at her and shouted, “Not now, madam. Trying to park,” and accelerated harder, pushing the Mini back again until it made contact with another parked car and Tom stalled the Trader. He huffed and puffed and then groaned and said to us all, “See. Bloody well stalled!” Then he looked back at the woman still standing there outside, her mouth gawping open, and said in an exasperated tone, “Now madam, what can I do for you?”
We watched them, our chins on the seat back, as Tom stood all mute looking at the damage to the Mini, listening to the woman who was now almost hysterical.
“I really would have thought that your children would have said something,” said the woman, “they were all looking at me as you mounted my car.”
Tom looked around. We were sure of it. Even though we’d ducked down below the seat. Quivering with a kind of evil excitement, we could feel his laser-like stare looking for us through the metal doors and the vinyl seatback.