Maeve's Times

by Maeve Binchy

  Shortly after this marathon flight I decided that the fault was certainly mine. No one else seemed to have such bad luck and when I read Helen Gurley Brown’s book Sex and the Single Girl I knew it must be my fault. Planes, she said, are wonderful places for picking up Grade A men. The more international and exciting the flight, the better your chances would be. I had an unworthy suspicion that even the vibrant H.G. Brown would not have made much of old Waltzing Matilda and his White Australia policy, his wallabies and his test match. However, I decided to follow her instructions on the very next flight.

  According to Sex and the Single Girl, you should get a seat fairly near the front of the plane (if that’s how you get into the plane; presumably if it’s one of the ones where you climb in through the tail, you should sit near the back). Then leave a great big handbag on the seat beside you. At the approach of other women or Grade Z men you leave the bag there, but when a Grade A man approaches you whip the bag from the seat and stare straight ahead.

  Once the Grade A man is installed you must establish contact by fumbling over your safety belt and the intention is to entangle yourself and the man in a knot from which with much tinkling laughter you both extricate yourselves, and such splendid rapport having been made he offers you a refined cocktail once you are airborne, and things progress from there.

  I’ll say this for S and the SG, the beginning part works like a dream. A man like Marlon Brando sat down beside me; the belt business was a fiasco because he started to fumble with his belt at the same time, and whatever way we seemed to do it we had to call the air hostess to disentangle us from the muddle. She took so long that I thought she was going to send for an acetylene torch. Anyway calm was restored and we were airborne. All around us people were clicking cigarette lighters and ordering refined cocktails, but the false Marlon Brando was staring straight ahead. It turned out that he was absolutely terrified of flying; all that business about the safety belt was the last straw and he seemed on the verge of having a very loud and serious fit. Determined to avoid this at all costs, I bought him a Scotch, the worst possible thing I should have done apparently, but it calmed him and he went to sleep almost at once on my shoulder.

  Now the journey from London to Gibraltar is very short, and although it is undoubtedly good for the morale to have a handsome man asleep in my arms – I smiled pityingly at all the people who passed by, who had no man at all – it did present grave problems when we got to the Rock. He just wouldn’t wake up. One of the hostesses thought he was dead but the other said he was just unconscious so I had to stay around for what was going to be either a revival or an inquest. I missed my bus to Malaga, I had to deal with Marlon Brando’s business partner who fortunately came to collect him, there was much face slapping, and ‘wake up Pete old man’. Nobody believed me when I said he was afraid of flying but everyone agreed that to feed a highly strung man like Pete Scotch whiskey was a most foolish and suspect course of action.

  So whenever I hear about the excitement and glamour of air travel I’m inclined to be a little cynical and I look forward to the day when we’ll have either single rows of seats, or compulsory films that must be watched in silence by the whole plane load, or better still, the sort of club car, Pullman lounges that you see in American films, where you can talk to everyone. Until then, we’ll just continue to belt ourselves in two by two or three by three and bore each other to death at altitudes of thousands of feet, flying hundreds of miles an hour all round the world.

  But Does Anybody Care?

  1 January 1969

  Perhaps it matters to you that Hull is 226 miles from Brighton and that there are 40 poles (or perches) to the rood. I feel that if you had started out on the road to Hull you’d have a roadmap or the signposts anyway, and if for some extraordinary reason you were lying down on the ground measuring things in roods and perches, it would all be written on the measuring tape.

  Anyone going back to Oxford this month knows that the Hilary Term starts on January 19th and no one else will be at a disadvantage by not knowing; and since neither the March nor September eclipses of the sun will be visible from Greenwich, why torment us by telling us about them?

  I must say that I find it very disagreeable indeed to open my diary on New Year’s Day and find pages of advice about poisoning, shock and wounds. Choking, in particular, is very loathsome.

  Would anyone remember ‘to dislodge obstruction, bend head and shoulders forward and in case of small child, hold upside down then thump between shoulder blades’ – just because the eye happened to light on this one day when looking for a telephone number?

  The advice is not all that practical, either. Severe Case of Cramp usually sets in when you are standing in a bus, and you can’t very well ‘take hold of foot and turn toes firmly upward until spasm has passed’. And in the case of poisoning by mouth, how on earth are most people to neutralise acid poisoning by administering chalk?

  This year’s diary seems loath to leave any space at all for what I hope will be my own memorable activities, so full is it of ridiculous information. Sandwiched between the telephone number you should call in Upavon if you want the weather forecast and a useless page giving the equivalent American and Continental clothes sizings (but admitting sadly that it is always best to try on the article before buying it) there is a type of Bon Viveur guide to wine, compiled by the Wine and Food Society. Everything gets a mark from 0 to 7; 0 equals ‘no good’ and 7 ‘the best’, it says simply. Apart from the interesting historical question it raises for the amateur – who must wonder whether it was drought or storms or strikes in the vineyard that made 1956 a poor starter – surely no one is going to take it seriously, and whip it out for consultation while the wine waiter hovers?

  Then there is the page marked ‘my car’ with all kinds of spaces for numbers of boot key, of ignition key, of chassis and insurance policy. To my mind, the type of person who would fill all this in is also the type who keeps a leather-bound log book in the glove compartment with the same details lovingly inscribed. He probably calls the car ‘she’, and knows everything by heart anyway.

  Yet into this whole field of bushels and pecks, centigrade and Fahrenheit, Lammas Day being August 1st and the sun rising at 9.05 a.m. next Saturday, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother being born on August 4th, 1900, and Ramadan facing us on November 22nd, has come a new challenge – the Special Interest diary. Not only the schoolboy, the businessman and the lady are catered for now, but a whole range of unlikely diarists from the filmgoer to the gardener, the photographer, the motorcyclist, the electrical engineer and the handyman.

  It certainly seems more reasonable to gear a diary to someone’s job or hobby than to assume that everyone in the world is going to be interested in the Golden Number, the Dominical Letters and the Epact, whatever the Epact may be. Last year it was nought, and this year they forgot it, thankfully, in my particular diary.

  Still, the specialised diaries have problems of their own. Would you rather carry around pages of advice about planting and pruning, or handy hints on slapping crows’ feet away from your eyes? You’ll have to make up your mind whether you are a lady first or a gardening enthusiast, or else buy two diaries. Perhaps they might organise detachable pages of information and you could make up personal diaries for your friends out of all of them: for the golfer – businessman – Catholic – music radio ham, for example. It has endless possibilities.

  The main idea of a diary, in case you have lost sight of it, is to provide some open space. From years of catastrophe with the page-a-day ones, I’ve now settled for a week between two pages, so that Sunday is always on the top left-hand corner. In the excitement of all those empty pages you think that you can fill a page a day easily, but by January 11th the whole thing has become impractical. Pages glare at you in empty accusation, two pages stick together and you completely forget to do something that you’d written in in red ink – there are pitfalls all the way with the page-a-day kind, unless you are aged 14 and have something to
say to yourself.

  What do people write in diaries anyway? I remember seeing a television programme quite a long time ago, about children’s diaries, and the kind of things they put in them. Apparently there was a relentless litany of ‘Got up, got dressed, went to school’, broken only by the triumphant but shaky hand of the mumps or measles victim: ‘Didn’t get up, didn’t go to school.’ They seemed to be obsessed with what the teachers wore; whether or not they liked them was quite immaterial to the interest in professional garb. Very few children’s diaries carried on in February. I can never quite regard mine as just an appointment book, and I feel a terrible urge to put in happenings and comments. I know it is both foolish and dangerous, particularly for someone who loses a diary so regularly.

  But after I discovered that in my indiscreet days I entered for Saturday, July 27th, 1963: ‘This was one of the best days in my life,’ and now I can’t remember why, I thought that whatever the risk, names and places must be brought back again.

  Actually, if you do put a bit of your life into your diary you are much more likely to get it back when you lose it than if you just list letters to write and how you spent your money. I’m sure it’s not the fact that I have written ‘Large financial reward for finder’ on mine that makes people post it to me or ring me and arrange a personal delivery, because no one except an unpleasant schoolboy ever accepted the reward. I even telephoned the police in Pearse Street once to say that I’d left it in a phone box in Westmoreland Street, and could they ever ask any Garda who was passing to look and see was it there? As if this was the most normal request for Gardaí in that area, they agreed and I collected it, red-faced, from the station next day.

  I’d even thought of bringing my diary to the Income Tax Commission in support of an appeal if necessary, but it’s probably just as well that it hasn’t been, yet. Even though there is lots of evidence of legitimate spending that no one would have had the energy to fake, there are all the other things as well which might take from the seriousness of the situation.

  So, like the man who made his money not out of the mustard eaten but by what people leave on their plates, diary publishers never really care whether or not we are faithful in our New Year’s resolve to record the happenings of 1969. Until they invent diaries that come in shorter editions at more frequent intervals, they have nothing to worry about. While disclaiming any responsibility for errors, they can continue to blind us with information which we mentally note as certain to be useful while we leap through it, looking for the cheerful space about whom to notify in case of accident.

  A Turkish Bath

  12 May 1969

  I didn’t believe that anything could cost only £1 in The Dorchester, it is not the kind of place that you expect to get much change from a fiver even if you were buying a drink. But they were right, the Turkish bath is only £1 and if you lose all sense of proportion and decide to have a massage as well it comes to £2. The porter nodded understandingly and approvingly when I asked him for directions to the Place; he didn’t quite say that he thought it an excellent idea on my part, but he certainly implied that it was a much wiser way of using The Dorchester than joining the ladies who were having morning coffee and sticky cakes in the lounge.

  Down a carpeted stairs to a receptionist who takes your name and hands you to a further receptionist in a white coat. ‘Do I pay now?’ I asked ignorantly, but this was all brushed aside with embarrassment, and indeed it was foolish, I suppose, to think that they have to take the money from you on the way in. Few people would have the courage to leave by a back entrance minus their clothes just to avoid paying £1. I was shown to a cubicle, given a key to a great big chest and asked to deposit not only my valuables, but also my clothes in this, given a huge white towel that would have swamped Finn MacCool, a pair of rubber sandals that wouldn’t have fitted Madame Butterfly and led towards the Room.

  The Room looked like something from a film set. There were about two dozen armchairs dotted around, all covered with snow-white towels. There was an alarming notice that said SILENCE in huge letters, and there was one occupant that looked as if she were dead in one of the chairs. The assistant led me to a chair, and said that I should stay there for about ten minutes before going into the heat. As I was already wondering if my heart had stopped beating from the temperature we were in, I asked was this not the heat, but she said disapprovingly that this was just the warm room and went away.

  I sat nervously and self-consciously in the towel-covered chair. There wasn’t a move from the corpse in the other one, and just as I was going to call the assistant and report the first fatal casualty of the day, it moved and said languidly, ‘You should have brought something to read you know, it would make you more relaxed, and you would sweat more.’ The possibility of going back to the newsstand in the foyer garbed as I was did not recommend itself, so we called the assistant and asked for some reading matter that would help me to relax and sweat. She brought the Daily Mirror.

  In no time at all it was time to move from what was called euphemistically the warm room, towards the Heat. The Heat was a tiled room with slotted benches around it, a bit like what I think a men’s lavatory might look like. Suddenly the warm room seemed cool as a mountain stream. The corpse hadn’t come with me, so I prepared to meet new friends. There was again one occupant, the thinnest woman I have ever seen in my life, wrapped from armpit to knee, not in a nice clinical towel, but in a red rubber sheet. The notice SILENCE was there again, but I thought I would die if I didn’t know why she was wearing the sheet, so I risked it. ‘It’s better for sweating,’ she said definitively, ‘much better.’

  It turned out she liked talking, so we agreed to waive the rules until someone else came in. She went there every week, when she came up to London to do the shopping. Sometimes she stayed for three hours and didn’t ever get around to the shopping, but it didn’t matter because most things could be delivered, even these days. She was surprised I hadn’t thought of bringing a rubber sheet. It was great for getting all the impurities out of the body; she looked reflectively up into the clouds of steam, as if she could see them wafting away. I looked nervously, too, wondering where they would land.

  We were joined by two chubby American teenagers, who didn’t want to have a Turkish bath at all, but their mother had been appalled at how thin everyone was in England, and since they were staying at the hotel she had sent them down to the Heat for the morning. Momma was at this moment probably eating spoonfuls of something fantastic in Fortnum & Masons, they grumbled. They wanted to be outside seeing London. One of them complained that she was taking creative writing at school, and she wanted to have something to write about when she got back.

  ‘You could always write about this,’ I said helpfully.

  ‘Who’d wanna read about this?’ she said reasonably.

  It was all-change time again soon. A woman wearing a black bathing suit came in and called me by name to follow her. ‘Good luck,’ said the Yanks gloomily. We went into a place resembling a clean abattoir with trestle tables and many taps and drains. I thought in my stupidity that this was the massage, but in fact it was what is known as the rub down, and incidentally is included in the £1.

  The rub down consisted of the woman in the bathing togs asking me to lie naked on a trestle table while she took what could only have been a pot scourer and scrubbed every inch of me. I was afraid to look at anywhere she rubbed twice in case seven layers of skin would have disappeared forever. Then she took what must have been a giant shaving brush and lather and washed it all over again. Then there was a hose of warm water, which was nice, but lastly I had to stand up and be hosed with cold water, which was not nice. I was led back to my cubicle and told that the masseuse would come for me shortly, but to have a little nap.

  What seemed like two days later, when I woke from the deepest sleep I have ever known, the masseuse was there; on with the mad sandals and the huge towel, and off to a part of the building where there was a swimming pool surround
ed by cubicles that looked like well-equipped stables. ‘Swim about a little, but don’t talk,’ I was told, which seemed an unnecessary caution, since there was no one to talk to, but perhaps some people, a little unnerved by all that scouring and heat, do in fact talk to themselves.

  The solitary silent and stark naked swim being over, and I can’t think when I felt so foolish in my whole life, we went into one of the stables, and I had the best massage possible. I can’t remember what the woman’s name was, though I did write it down at the time, but you couldn’t miss her. She had been there for years, apparently, and is very much in demand. I only got her by accident.

  On questioning, I told her how much I earned, why I was in London, whether I was in love, the state of the Irish economy, what I thought of Enoch Powell, and advised her where to go on her holidays. She told me what she earned, the famous people she had massaged, a very exciting story about a film star, ‘no names mentioned, of course’, how the type of person had changed over the years in The Dorchester, and that I should have a massage every day, and never eat again in my life. We had a lovely time and I was very sorry when the hour was up.

  Back to the cubicle again, yet another deep sleep, a cup of tea, three cigarettes, and I got dressed. Taking the money at the door seemed to be a severe embarrassment to the receptionist, but we managed it, and I left The Dorchester three hours after I had gone in, feeling better than I have ever felt in my life. All the cares and woes of the Ideal Homes Exhibition were long forgotten, I had lost three pounds in weight and only two in money. It’s about the best value in London.

  Life as a Waitress

  30 June 1969