The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  I said I had no idea, and had no favourites; all I was sure of was that I always disliked the most recent one. I added that my former agent, George Greenfield, thought Flashman at the Charge satisfied the canons better than any of the others. Kingsley shook his head firmly. “It’s got to be Flashman and the Redskins,” said he, and proceeded to tell me why, in some detail—and if I seem unduly self-admiring in recounting this, my excuse is that it isn’t every day that you hear that kind of thing from arguably the leading writer of his time.

  He was probably a man of unexpected enthusiasms. He told me that he had recently developed a mild passion for Scottish folksongs, “The Flowers of the Forest” in particular, and we discovered an interesting (to me, anyway) piece of common ground: neither of us had the foggiest idea what R. L. Stevenson’s The Suicide Club was about, and we weren’t too sure about Jekyll and Hyde, either.

  All writers are proud and delighted to have kind things said about their work, but few things have moved me more than learning that in the last days of Kingsley’s life, Flashman was his favourite companion. That shook me, and led me to wonder what I would like to read when preparing to meet the Great Perhaps, and came to the conclusion that I’d be happiest with something funny, like Leacock or Wodehouse, or perhaps a good robust piece of sensational fiction. Synthetic Men of Mars, for instance, or any James Hadley Chase.* No, even better, any back numbers from the 1930s of the Wizard, Hotspur, Rover, etc.…Who needs Proust when you can go over the edge and into the undiscovered country with the Wolf of Kabul and Clicky-ba?

  I worried a moment ago about self-admiration, but how one is to write autobiographical material without a modicum of smirking swank, I’m damned if I know. So, just to get the vanity bit out of the way, I shall record that I have been proud to number among Flashman fans not only Kingsley but such celebrities as Charlton Heston, Johnnie Cash, Burt Lancaster, Wodehouse (how lucky can you get?), and a plump, smiling, white-haired old gentleman to whom I was introduced in Trader Vic’s by the late Bob Parrish, film director, many years ago. Bob presented me, the old chap cried: “Flashman!” and I realised I was shaking hands with Charlie Chaplin. I’m sorry mentioning it, but wouldn’t you?

  Which brings me to memorable (to me) encounters with great men, the first being Field-Marshal (then General) Slim, of whom I have written elsewhere; we didn’t meet, exactly, but I was one of a rifle company whom he addressed in Central Burma, and he was unforgettable. I never saw a more honest, human, and indestructible man. My mate Grandarse, a walking mass of Cumbrian brawn, used to say: “Neebody’s tough. Ah could put doon Joe Louis, easy—aye, and he could put me doon, an’ a’. See what Ah mean? Naw, neebody’s tough.” He added, after seeing Slim: “Mind, Ah’ll mek an exception in that booger’s case.”

  From “the greatest battlefield general since Wellington” to perhaps the best-loved funny man of the last century may seem an odd leap, but it was only a few years after seeing Slim that I was fortunate enough to meet Oliver Hardy. He and Stan Laurel were at the end of their joint career, touring British theatres, and in due course arrived at Her Majesty’s, Carlisle, where they were to be the penultimate act in the second half of the bill. As usual with Carlisle audiences, there was a pessimistic critic in the gents, observing glumly to whoever would listen: “They say Laurel an’ ’Ardy spoil this show. Aye, that’s what they’re saying.” To my delight, when the two great men took the stage and put on an act whose simple brilliance and comic timing were close to genius, the prophet of gloom was to be seen having hysterics of mirth.

  I was a young reporter, but it wasn’t journalistic zeal that sent me backstage during the last act; I just wanted to meet Hardy. I knocked on his door, the well-known voice called: “Come in!”, and there he was, bowler on head, blue suit crumpled, sitting on a chair, looking rather weary in that resigned, patient way that all the world knew and smiled to see.

  I told him that I just wanted to say thanks for all the fun and laughter of years, and would have withdrawn quickly, but he bade me to a chair, shook hands, and thanked me with old-world courtesy for coming in to see him. I must have asked him some question or other, for he began to talk, of his Scottish ancestry, and of two of his film colleagues whom I especially admired, Dennis King, that splendid baritone of Fra Diavolo fame, and pop-eyed Jimmy Finlayson, the master of suppressed fury. I didn’t want to linger, for he looked truly tired, but as I was making for the door he called “God bless!”, and I turned to find that he was giving me the Hardy farewell, beaming and twiddling his tie with those plump fingers. Memories don’t come any better, and whenever I recall that stout, kindly figure sitting in that seedy dressing-room, I hear the words of the cinema narrator: “Laurel and Hardy, two very funny gentlemen. Two very funny, gentle men.”

  No one would call Bill Shankly gentle; I have heard some of his Liverpool players call him the very reverse, and his manner was certainly brisk and frequently abrasive. But he was a merry man, too, loud and lively, with a good understanding and, on occasion, something suspiciously like a kind heart.

  I knew him when I was a sports reporter on the Carlisle Journal and he was the novice manager of Carlisle United, the club with whom he had made his playing debut in English football, after an apprenticeship in his native Scotland with the splendidly named Glenbuck Cherrypickers. It is an acquaintance which has given Kathy and me enormous status on holiday cruises, with waiters who seem to come mostly from Liverpool; nothing has been too good for those fortunates who have actually known and spoken to one who in his day was the uncrowned king of Merseyside.

  Kathy’s first meeting with him—she too was a reporter—was at some function which he was to open, and provided her first acquaintance with what I can only call the West of Scotland industrial accent. Bill beamed affably and asked: “Hoo ye gonnon?” and it took her a moment to translate this as: “How are you going on?”, a common Glasgow greeting. In fact, although his accent was strange to unaccustomed ears, he was an unusually clear speaker, with a decisive, rapid-fire delivery; Shankly meant what he said, after a moment’s thought usually accompanied by a drawn-out exclamation of the letter “a”, something like “Eh-h-h-h-” followed by a rapid patter of speech.

  He spoke as he was, and as he had played: a bundle of energy who never let up. The first sight I ever had of him was in a newsreel of the England–Scotland match at Wembley in 1938; it had been a dull game, and in the last minute, with a Scottish victory foregone, the players were moving lackadaisically—except for one, chasing the ball up to the final whistle: Shankly. I played against him once, in a knock-up game at Brunton Park, and was ill-advised enough to shoulder-charge him. It was like hitting a brick wall, and I doubt if he even noticed.

  I have heard that he was a tyrant at Liverpool, and indeed he imposed a discipline at Carlisle which would probably seem excessive today. Football was his life, his abiding passion, and he expected (and got) a dedication to it from his players. I remember him seeing off a coach carrying the Carlisle team to an away match in the charge of his assistant; as it pulled away, Shankly had an afterthought, and ran after it, beating on the side and shouting “Fred, Fred, don’t stop at yon restaurant in Hellifield or the gannets’ll eat themselves stupid!” His training methods might seem primitive to modern eyes, but they were uncompromising.

  He could be very human. At a reserve game a young trialist was playing deplorably, and apparently deaf to the instructions roared at him from the touchline; late in the game he put the finishing touch to his lamentable display by scoring an own goal, and when the final whistle blew I expected a Shankly explosion. But when Bill took his accustomed place at the tunnel mouth, patting each Carlisle player with a muttered encouragement as they trooped past (a typical Shanklyism), and the offender came off last, hangdog and plainly apprehensive, he too received a pat and “On ye go, son.” I must have shown my surprise, for Bill shrugged and muttered, “Ach, whit the hell, the boy wis daein’ his best.”

  He retained an affectio
n for Carlisle long after he had become a household name, and when the club won promotion to the First Division (now the Premiership), and topped the table after three games, he described it as “the greatest day in the history of fitba’!”

  How nice a man he could be I discovered when Kathy and I, having emigrated to Canada and worked as reporters through a freezing Saskatchewan winter, returned to Britain after a year. On our departure Bill had bidden me good-bye with a crushing handshake and an emphatic Shankly benison: “Eh-h-h-h, ye’re daein’ the right thing, Geordie! There’s far more opportunities in Canada than there is here! On ye go, son, and a’ the best!”

  Now, on our return, and the inevitable reaction from various well-wishers of oh-so-you-didn’t-make-good-and-here-you-are-back-with-your-tail-between-your-legs, it was an unexpected pleasure to meet Shankly on English Street and be told: “Ye’re back? Ye’ve done the right thing, Geordie—there’s far more opportunities here than there is ower yonder! Good for you, son!”

  A hard man? Hardly.

  Lastly, a genial old gentleman now living in retirement in California and delighting our household each year with his Christmas cards, which he paints himself. Seventy years ago he was a popular supporting player in Hollywood musicals, a tall, gangling, loosejointed, country-bumpkin-style comedian with a slow humorous drawl, puzzled expression, and brilliantly relaxed dancing style. After a memorable failure to appear in The Wizard of Oz he became a respected character actor, and gained international celebrity as the archetypal hillbilly in one of the most popular TV series of the sixties. If that were not enough, he is also an authority on Mary Queen of Scots, and is probably one of the few people who know exactly where the Battle of Evesham was fought. He is Buddy Ebsen.

  He was at the peak of his career as the yokel turned millionaire, Jed Clampett, and detective Barnaby Jones, when he phoned to introduce himself, announce his arrival in Cumberland, and ask me to be his guide on a brief tour of the Border country. He had read my history of the sixteenth-century reivers, The Steel Bonnets, which dealt in part with Mary Stuart, Bothwell, and their adventures in the wild frontier country; as an enthusiast on the subject, he wanted to see the land and people at first hand.

  We met in the dining-room of a Carlisle hotel where he was trying to finish breakfast while detaching himself politely from admiring American tourists, with many a “Gee!” and “Gosh!” and “Waal, ye don’t say!” to the delight of both guests and attentive waitresses; all fans of the Beverly Hillbillies knew the grizzled head and rumpled features, and were enjoying the happy discovery that he was as nice and funny off screen as he was on.

  He was also a most satisfactory tourist, exclaiming eagerly at the scenery as I drove him north through the Debatable Land to Liddesdale, the cockpit of the Borderland, and the grim fortress of Hermitage, where Bothwell had been bushwhacked and wounded by the Elliots, and Mary had risked life and limb on a hectic ride to be with him. Buddy knew all about this, and stalked round the ruined castle photographing and murmuring: “Boy, that’s an impressive hunk o’ stone!”

  He was indefatigable, too, insisting on tracking down Johnnie Armstrong’s gravestone at Carlanrig, assuring me that it wasn’t nearly as tough to find as the site of the Battle of Evesham, which he’d done recently, hacking his way through bracken and bramble to the marker stone, and consequently arriving late for a Shakespeare production at Stratford (“but my wife’s talking to me again now”). We visited Hollows Tower, one of the best Border peles, dating from 1492, and he stood in awe-stricken silence at the thought that it had been there when Columbus discovered the New World. Accosted by tourists (as he was at every stop we made), he flourished his copy of The Steel Bonnets, advertising it in the most shameless fashion (“Publicity, that’s the name o’ the game”).

  Naturally, he wanted to talk about Border history, and I wanted to talk about his movies, of which he had little to say, but recalled a production of HMS Pinafore when he was at sea in the US Navy; he was to play Admiral Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, and was already in costume when action stations sounded, so he’d served through the engagement in the full fig of a Victorian Royal Navy officer. I still think it’s a shame the Japanese didn’t take him prisoner; their reaction to Buddy Ebsen in cocked hat and tail coat would have been something to see.

  We had tea in Hawick, and watching the people pass by outside the cafe, he asked me about the racial origins of the Borderers; I told him they were part Viking and he nodded contentedly. “So that’s why I feel at home here. My people are Danish.”

  We didn’t meet again for several years, when we had lunch in Century City. Jim Hill, Burt Lancaster’s partner, joined us, and afterwards told me about Buddy’s famous non-appearance in The Wizard of Oz. I knew the authorised version, that he had been cast as the Tin Man, but had suffered an allergic reaction to the silver paint make-up, and was replaced by Jack Haley.

  Not so, said Jim. What had really happened was that Buddy had refused to be painted silver, even defying the great Louis B. Mayer himself. The result was that for eight years Buddy did no film work; after the war he and his sister, with whom he had appeared in vaudeville, resumed their stage partnership, touring the country. Once, in a New England winter, their car got bogged down in a snowdrift, and Buddy laboured in a blizzard to dig them out, heaving heroically and finally breaking off in a state of near-exhaustion to stagger round and address his sister through the car window: “Boy, I sure told Louis B. Mayer, didn’t I?”

  That’s Jim Hill’s version, and it fits. If it’s not true, it should be.

  * Sensational, but far from trivial. In his Martian romances Edgar Rice Burroughs foresaw transplant surgery with uncanny accuracy, as well as radar, electronic tagging, and the autopilot, and in one of his Tarzan books introduced cloning long before it was known to science. His imagination of space travel was much closer to today’s truth than either Verne’s or Wells’s, and his vision of “hot-house cities”, enormous glassed-in communities, will no doubt be realised as our atmosphere deteriorates.

  As to Hadley Chase, I find it remarkable that in all the learned discussion of “the most influential books” of the century, or the millennium, no mention is ever made of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which probably did more to shape popular attitudes in its time (and consequently in our own) than anything from the fashionable literary icons. That most perceptive of prophets, George Orwell, singled it out in one of his best essays; he detested No Orchids (“a header into the cesspool”), admired its author’s skill, and was plainly disturbed by it, and by other of Chase’s works, which he had evidently studied closely.

  For the uninitiated I should explain that the Wolf of Kabul was a British agent on the pre-1939 Northwest Frontier, and that “Clicky-ba” was a bloodstained cricket bat used as a club by his faithful attendant, Chung. They were not politically correct.

  ANGRY OLD MAN 5

  The Truth that Dare not Speak its Name

  THAT POLITICAL CORRECTNESS should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country’s decline. For America…well, a country that could tolerate Clinton in the White House and Edward Kennedy in public view will buy anything, as P. T. Barnum observed, and the transatlantic tendency to embrace the latest craze is one of their more endearing traits, but for Britain to swallow—or at least to accept at the prompting of its media and supposed intelligentsia—the most pernicious doctrine to threaten the world since communism and fascism, with both of which it has much in common…that truly beggars belief. But it’s here, in all its deceitful wickedness, and it’s a brave soul who will dare to lift two fingers in its direction.

  Political correctness, whatever form it takes, almost always involves a denial of truth, or at best a refusal to recognise it; it may be the lie downright, or a dishonest, even cowardly, reluctance to face reality. In both these senses it would have been anathema in Britain fifty years ago—or more probably submerged in gales of scornful laughter. For political correctness would be a to
tal hoot if it were not undermining the concept of truth as we have always understood it—until now, when truth is acceptable only if it suits the prejudices and false doctrines of the powerful and unscrupulous p.c. lobby.

  Its chief weapons are censorship and taboo, often employed far beyond the limits of lunacy, as in the case of the council which called for Christmas decorations to be “restrained” in case they gave offence to “non-Christians”. (And mosques? And synagogues? Would the same council be concerned in case they gave offence to non-Muslims and non-Jews? One suspects not.)

  The list of such evil imbecilities is, of course, endless, but before describing my own encounters, as a writer, with political correctness, I cannot resist a few random examples as a reminder of how low we have sunk. Even thirty years ago they would have been greeted with incredulous derision, but now they are enshrined in the p.c. code.

  The word “black” must be used with care, or even removed from the vocabulary. Expressions like black market, blackspot (as in reference to accidents), black economy, and blackguard must be avoided in case they upset some racist bigot whose antennae are attuned to take offence where none, obviously, is intended. In one instance, a person of African descent actually objected to being called “a black man” and “black friend”. The nursery rhyme “Ba-ba black sheep” is banned in at least one infant school to my knowledge, and there exists a council-run canteen where (wait for it) black coffee must be referred to as “coffee without milk”.

  Elsewhere, references to war and victory were censored from a plaque commemorating the little ships of Dunkirk, in case foreigners (guess who) were offended. Concern for the tender feelings of the same people inspired the removal of a Spitfire from a beer advertisement.*