A Long Trip to Teatime

by Anthony Burgess

  His blood a mix of Scotch and Dutch,

  Was dead in 1931,

  But he had loved both long and much.

  His years of life were 84,

  And his inventions manifold,

  He knew what telephones were for,

  Before the Graham Bell had tolled.

  When he was in his 30th year,

  Though many folk were prone to laugh,

  He startled many a serious ear,

  By building the 1st phonograph.

  When he had just gone 32,

  He showed the true inventive stamp,

  By making something brightly new –

  The electric incandescent lamp.

  When photographs had just come hither,

  Old T.A.E. went Ha ha ha,

  And mad those stillies movies with a

  Kinetoscopic camera.’

  He was very lucky to be offered a lift by a sort of van that stopped just in front of him in a fog of dust, hooting away on horns that played a little tune. When the dust-fog cleared, Edgar was able to see that written all along the van was the legend THE EDENBOROUGH REVUE.

  ‘An interesting man, that,’ said King Edwin, ‘grrrrrprrrrr. If we’d had him in Northumberland, there’s no knowing what wonders he might have performed. So now then, boy, grrrrr, go on your way to my great city of Edenborough.’

  ‘Yours?’ said Edgar.

  ‘Yes, yes, grrrrr yes, they named it after me. It’s Edwin-grrrrr, really, though, but they made a mistake when they wrote it down. I didn’t correct it, of course, for it was a very cold day, and everybody that came up to me was saying, ‘Edwin, brrrrr,’ so that was all right.’ The dog fell asleep again, snoring loudly, so Edgar, somewhat refreshed, continued his journey.

  He still had several miles (or kilometres – more kilometres than miles, of course) to go before he got there. At one point he came to a big notice swinging high over the road, secured to two pillars that woodpeckers were happily pecking away at, which said: ‘SEVERAL MILES TO EDENBOROUGH. SEVERAL X 1.609 KILOMETRES TO THE SAME. BUT IT WILL BE WORTH IT!’ He was very lucky to be offered a lift by a sort of van that stopped just in front of him in a fog of dust, hooting away on horns that played a little tune. When the dust-fog cleared, Edgar was able to see that written all along the van was the legend THE EDENBOROUGH REVUE. He ran to it, the driver already had the door open, and he entered, saying thank you with real gratitude, to find that the interior part of the van was filled with little men who greeted him cheerfully. When Edgar had found a seat – he had to remove a wooden box labelled Best Finnan Haddie and a heavy tabby cat that was guarding it – these little men were very eager to explain who they were and what the Edenborough Revue was. They, they said, were the Edenborough Revue. They sang and danced and told jokes and acted sketches, and one of them, who said his name was Tommy Carlyle, did impersonations. He was a sad little man who rolled his r’s a great deal and kept saying: ‘Aye, aye, och, weel, that’s the way o’ it.’

  ‘What kind of impersonations?’ Edgar wanted to know.

  ‘Och, weel, aye – here’s one o’ King Edward the First o’ England.’ (While he was saying that, Edgar thought: oh no, back to all those boring Anglo-Saxon kings, but then he remembered that Edward the First was not Anglo-Saxon). Tommy Carlyle composed his sad face into a look of haughty majesty. Then he said: ‘And the noo – King Edward the Second.’ He made the same face as before. ‘And the noo,’ he said: ‘– King Edward the Third.’ It was still the same haughtily majestic face.

  Edgar said: ‘Is that all you do – the King Edwards of England?’

  ‘Och,’ said Tommy Carlyle, ‘there’s an awful lot o’ them. Nine to ma computation.’

  ‘Eight, surely,’ said Edgar. ‘Edward the Eighth was the last one. He ruled less than a year. Since then it’s been – oh, certainly no more Edwards.’

  ‘Och, ye wee sleekit cowerin’ beastie,’ said Tommy Carlyle. ‘There is unco’ little ye ken aboot it and that’s a fac’. Edward the Ninth – aye, there was a monarch for ye, Sassenach though he was.’ And he composed his sad face into a look of haughty majesty. The rest of the troupe clapped vigorously, so Edgar joined in against his will, and Tommy Carlyle made a sad bow.

  ‘Nobody like Tommy,’ said a man who called himself Mr Gladstone and nursed a heavy bag on his knee. ‘He always brings the house down in Edenborough.’

  ‘What do you do, sir?’ asked Edgar.

  ‘Play the piano on the black notes, me,’ winked Mr Gladstone. ‘And old Tom Macaulay over there – he plays the piano on the white notes.’

  The man referred to, who was smoking a big pipe that smelt of burning paper, nodded and nodded to show this was true.

  ‘At the same time?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Mr Gladstone said. ‘We get a bit tangled up, of course, sometimes. But if you’ve got all those black and white keys it stands to reason they all have to be played, otherwise there’s no point in paying for them. That’s right, Tom, isn’t it?’

  ‘Right, Bill, right.’ And Mr Macaulay nodded. A piece of burning paper fell from his pipe on to the cat, which took no notice at all as it soon went out (the burning paper, not the cat).

  ‘But it must sound – well, pretty awful,’ said Edgar.

  Mr Gladstone smiled. ‘That’s what they all say,’ he said. ‘Which shows they don’t know much about it. Uneducated, that’s their trouble. Right, Tom?’

  ‘Right, Bill, right.’

  ‘You have to be brought up to it,’ said Mr Gladstone. Then he took a newspaper out of his pocket and began to read the front page with close and frowning attention. The newspaper seemed to be at least a hundred years old. A man who looked nearly as old, and bent and stiff but who said he was a dancer (and that his name was Sir J. Stephen), now said:

  ‘Not read it yet, Bill? You’ve been on that same page to my certain knowledge for the last fifty-five – no, I’m telling a lie – the last fifty-six point five five five recurring years.’ Mr Gladstone said very sternly:

  ‘There’s almost more than meets the eye, that’s why you have to read with very close attention. Right, Tom?’

  ‘Right, Bill, right.’

  ‘For instance, it says here: BANK ROBBERS GET AWAY WITH FIFTEEN THOUSAND POUNDS. Now I’ve been thinking of the true meaning of that for something like –’

  ‘Fifty-six point five five five recurring years,’ said Sir J. Stephen.

  ‘Very well. And I think it really means that they got away with fifteen months – that being their prison sentence, you know.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Edgar,’ that thousand pounds is a kind of code for months?’

  ‘It could be,’ said Mr Gladstone gravely. ‘You have to look very deep into it. They always say that time is money. Right, Tom?’

  ‘Right, Bill, right.’

  ‘It would mean,’ said Edgar, working it swiftly out in his head, ‘five hundred pounds a day in September, April, June and November.’

  ‘Well, there you are then,’ said Mr Gladstone in triumph. ‘And with twenty-five hours a day – which is what I want, and what I’m determined to get in the next parliament – that would mean – well, you work it out, boy.’

  ‘Twenty pounds an hour,’ said Edgar immediately.

  ‘And not bad pay either,’ said a man in clown’s costume called Art Stanley. ‘Better than what we get.’ Then he looked sternly from his painted face out of the window, and Edgar looked too. There was a view of mountains and a beautiful big lake shining in the sun, and there seemed to be men dancing about on its nearest shore. ‘There they are, then,’ said Art Stanley. ‘We’d better get out to ‘em.’ The rest of the troupe sighed and nodded. Mr Gladstone said to the driver:

  ‘We’ll have to get out, Matthew, and bang them about a bit.’ The driver, a man with pencils and pens behind both ears, nodded sadly and braked the van by the side of the road. Edgar said:

  ‘Who? Why?’

  ‘Poets,’ said Mr Macaulay, blowing burni
ng paper from his pipe. ‘Could never abide this lot. But you have to creep up on them slowly.’

  Edgar sighed and asked no more questions. Instead, he got out with the others, who kept whispering ‘Shhhhh’ very loudly to each other and began to crawl feebly through the long grass. Tommy Carlyle started to sneeze.

  ‘Shhhhhh. SHHHHHHHHHHHH!’

  ‘Ah canna help it, mon. It’s the hay feverrrr. Arch WHOOOOO!’

  There were about a dozen of these men dancing about by the lake, all rather thin and tall except for one, who was fat and panted a lot and said:

  ‘What’s the summmmject or ommmmject of the exercise?’

  ‘Listen now,’ said a thin man with a mad look and a lot of teeth. ‘It’s to get the inspiration working. Inspiration means breathing, you see, and now we’re all breathing really hard.’ Then he began to recite:

  ‘A daffodil’s a little flower

  That gets its money by the hour.

  It blues the money, more or less,

  And buys itself a yellow dress.

  It flounces and is very vain

  But does not mind a drop of rain

  Or e’en when typhoons tear the County,

  Since it is all from Nature’s bounty.’

  Tommy Carlyle, lying in the grass trying to control his sneezing, gave out a loud baying sound, like a dog that howls at the moon, and cried: ‘Och, the blitherin’ blatherskite. Och, the sheer horror o’ it.’ Mr Gladstone nodded resignedly at the others, and then called:

  ‘Forward the Light Brigade!’

  What Edgar saw then was not very edifying. The members of the Edenborough Revue leapt rather feebly on the poets and tried to throw them into the lake. But the fat poet who had talked of summmmjects and ommmmjects raised his hands into the air and said: ‘Magic. Poetry is magic. Both the summmmject and the ommmmject.’ And he recited, while the thinner poets were being put into the lake and then coming out again to put the Edenborough Revue into it:

  ‘A weasel plonked a large guitar

  Upon the coast of Barbary

  Where all the deadly lemmings are

  And wisdom is a foul cigar

  Smoked by Sir Hubert Laurelee,

  And bayed her blessings to the sun

  And croaked a creaking malison

  Upon a sole belated star,

  And when the dreadful day was done

  She dove into the burning sea

  And there, for all I know of it,

  Her song, suffused with dreadful glee,

  May soothe the biter and the bit

  And lead the traveller home to tea.’

  Even Edgar, who thought the whole thing was nonsense, was affected by that last line, but the effect on Tommy Carlyle was quite remarkable. ‘Och aye,’ he said, nodding, ‘ma bonny wee laddies, it’s no’ sae bad, ye ken. Aye, therrre’s a cerrrtain quality aboot it, ye maun admit.’ The poets took advantage of his momentary admiration to grab hold of him and throw him into the lake, but he still nodded, sitting in the water with fish leaping out of his very loose collar, saying: ‘Och aye, there’s nae gainsayin’ it the noo.’ But the rest of the Edenborough Revue troupe grew very angry and began to grab the poets by the hair and throw them in to join Tommy Carlyle. The fat poet was the first to hit the water in this renewed assault, and he lay there crying:

  ‘Now I understand. His floating hair. I always wondered what it meant when I wrote it, but now I know.’

  Edgar, disgusted by the whole unseemly business, went back to the van, where the driver sat gloomily at the wheel. The cat was sleeping peacefully in the back but it woke rather angrily when Edgar appeared and said, cattily: ‘If you’ve come to steal the finnan haddie you’ve another think coming, my boyo. I’ll scratch you with vigour, also with my claws, so watch out.’ Then it went to sleep again and the driver said:

  ‘Always the same. Always always always. I’ve a good mind to get out of this job altogether and go back to what I was before.’

  ‘And what was that?’ asked Edgar politely.

  ‘You see,’ the driver said, ignoring the question, ‘they’ve carried that case of finnan haddie about for longer than I can’t remember. Now why they don’t open it up and eat it is more than what I can’t understand. I likes nothing better than some nice poached haddock with a couple of poached eggs on top. But it’s my private opinion – and I’d ask you not to noise it abroad overmuch – that they keeps it there just to give the cat something to do. Protect it, you know. Ridiculous.’

  ‘And what was the job you did before?’ Edgar asked patiently.

  The poets took advantage of his momentary admiration to grab hold of him and throw him into the lake, but he still nodded, sitting in the water with fish leaping out of his very loose collar . . .

  ‘I used to go round the schools,’ sighed the driver. ‘Seeing that everybody was teaching proper and that the kids was being taught proper, as you might say. But they wouldn’t take no notice of it when I put them right. You’d not hardly credit some of the things the kids was taught.’

  ‘What, for instance?’ asked Edgar.

  ‘Well, that William Shakepaw did not write THE DOG OF VENICE, for instance. Nor wrote MUD, SIMMER KNIGHT’S CREAM. Now this Knight’s Cream was very good, obtainable from the best of dairies, and it had to be simmered to taste proper, and Mud did it as well as any.’

  ‘What sort of mud?’ asked Edgar.

  The driver sneered. ‘There was only one Mud that I never knew of, he said, ‘and that was Albert Mud, a real good cook and the slowest simmerer ever you seen.’

  ‘Look,’ Edgar said. ‘I think I’ll get out and walk, if you don’t mind.’ For he was really growing very tired of all this stupidity. He would really even have preferred to be yawning in the classroom and hearing about the horrible Anglo-Saxon kings.

  ‘Please yourself,’ said the driver huffily. ‘It’s nearly done, all that flapdoodle out there by the waters. In here they’ll be directly, spilling wet over everything. Then we can be on us way. Another thing they said he didn’t write was HALL’S WELL THAT END – SWELL. That was a lovely thing. An American gentleman comes to this country looking for Sir Peregrine Hall, that being the man’s name. When he gets near where he is they says to him that’s Hall’s well’s over there, and this American gentleman says that’s fine and goes over to it.’

  ‘Is that the whole story?’ asked Edgar, fascinated despite his disgust.

  ‘Why,’ laughed the driver, as though amazed at Edgar’s stupidity, ‘would you want more? The whole story runs to near twelve hundred pages. There’s what happens on the way, see, and what happens afterwards. But if you’re like all the others, you’d best get out of my van and make your own way alone.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the cat from its sleep. ‘I don’t care much for thieves sitting around.’

  So Edward got out, just in time to see the Edenborough Revue troupe coming out of the water and the poets dancing about further away than they had been before. The troupe were all very wet, and Edgar did not much like the idea of having to sit with them. So he hurried off down the road, hoping he would reach Edenborough soon. He wanted to get home in time for tea.

  CHAPTER IV

  Also

  the Road

  to Edenborough

  POOR EDGAR! It was taking him such a long time to get to Edenborough. Poor you too, for that matter: I’m sure your anxiety to get there must be quite as great as his. But if you only knew (and you will know all too soon) what was waiting for Edgar in Edenborough, you would be as happy as I am to put off his arrival there.

  What happened to Edgar now was that he was intrigued by some curious-looking blue flowers growing in a cluster by the side of the road (the left side, if you want to know). These flowers seemed to be chattering at a great rate in very high-pitched English, and Edgar had to get very close in order to hear what they were saying. Also, of course, he wished to see where the sounds were coming from, for flowers, although they can sometimes look like f
aces, have no mouths. The sounds themselves didn’t make a great deal of sense to Edgar, and he wondered why flowers should be so excited and talkative about this kind of thing:

  ‘. . . It was King Nidhud told him to do it. He had to put the apple on his own poor son’s head and then shoot an arrow at it. Egil – that was his name.’

  ‘You’re thinking of William Tell, stupid.’

  ‘Egil. Egil. That was his name. He was the brother of Wayland Smith. You ask Mr Honeythunder. Or Mr Grewgious. They’ll tell you all about it.’

  Edgar moved closer and closer and then, to his shock and horror, found the ground giving way beneath him. What he had done, of course, was to tread on some grass that covered a deep ditch. Down into this ditch he went: it was a dry ditch, that was one blessing, but it was impossible for him to climb out. The sides of the ditch were of smooth clay, and he could not find a hand-hold anywhere. So he did the only thing he could do, and that was to shout for help. ‘Help! Help!’ he cried. The flowers did not seem to hear him.

  ‘. . . The question is whether we have free will or it’s all worked out ahead for us. You ought to read Jonathan Edwards, missionary to the Red Indians.’

  ‘. . . Boxing is what I like, though we don’t see enough of it here. The gentle art of pugilism is what it’s called.’

  ‘. . . Egil nothing. It’s William Tell you’re thinking of. A Swiss he was.’

  Edgar was very irritated with the flowers. Luckily he was not hurt, only a little bruised, and the bottom of the ditch was mossy. But he did not want to stay there for ever, so he kept on calling ‘Help! Help!’

  ‘. . . You take Philip the Duke of Orleans, for example. Gave himself a new name – Equality, a silly sort of name – but he had his head chopped off just the same.’

  ‘You ought to make a little poem of that. Equality – that was his name. But they cut his loaf off just the same.’

  ‘I said nothing about a loaf, stupid.’

  Edgar still went on calling for help and was still ignored by the flowers, but soon he found something heavy sitting on his chest. He could not see very clearly in the dim light of the deep ditch, but he felt sure that it was a big tortoise sitting there. He put up his hand to confirm this, and sure enough there was a great tough shell and a wrinkled lizard head peering from beneath it. The tortoise said: