Collected Columns

by Michael Frayn

  A parent showing symptoms of jealousy needs lots of love and reassurance. Once in a while it might help to beat the boy next door in a clean fight, or win that scholarship. But you can’t do this too often without the risk of spoiling the parent. Once a parent gets the idea that he can just sulk and you’ll win a scholarship for him he’ll lead you a terrible dance.

  BE FRIENDLY BUT FIRM. In general, don’t give your parents too much chance to argue. Just quietly get on with whatever you want to do, perhaps chatting amiably to distract their attention. The chances are they won’t even notice, or that when they do it will be too late for them to feel like making a fuss.

  Parents can sometimes drive a small child almost to distraction by dawdling about in shops, or talking to friends. It doesn’t really help to keep nagging, or to try dragging them along by brute force. If I were you I’d hop cheerfully about from foot to foot, and say in a firm, friendly voice: ‘I want to go to the lavatory.’ If that doesn’t work, you could try turning white, and saying you’re going to be sick.

  REMEMBER YOU’RE HELPING THEM TO GROW UP. It’s your job to help your parents grow up into mature, responsible old-age pensioners, self-confident, armed with a workable code of morals and manners, and too exhausted in mind and body to make trouble for anyone else. If you keep in mind that you’re training your children’s grandparents you won’t go far wrong.

  (1966)

  Strain cook thoroughly before serving

  When I was a bachelor I used to dine variously on fried eggs, fried bacon, fried eggs and fried bacon, or fried bacon and fried eggs. There were also occasional days when I had forgotten to buy either eggs or bacon.

  My somewhat limited range in the culinary field has earned me but a menial position in the kitchen now that I am married. I am allowed to peel the potatoes and empty the trashcan, provided I stand to attention when spoken to, but not to prod the soufflés, or baste the beans, or whatever real cooks do.

  There are, however, certain recipes which reduce my wife to such a state of nervous disintegration that she is forced to lean on me abjectly. I mean the sort written by authors who haven’t yet heard the good news about the invention of weights and measures. And if a recipe-writer still hasn’t got round to the concept of ounces and pints (or for that matter hins and cubic cubits – we’re prepared to make every effort to compromise), you can bet your bottom tealeaf that he hasn’t managed to grasp the principles of written communication either, or of predicting what tools and materials he is going to need until he has actually picked them up.

  I hear despairing cries from the kitchen, and find my wife set on making a recipe which starts off: ‘Pour a fair amount of milk into a medium-sized bowl, and throw in a generous handful of soya beans. Add a modicum of grated cheese and the quantity of chopped chives which will lie on a sovereign piece.’

  I help my wife choose a particularly medium-sized looking bowl, and supply the generosity for measuring out the soya beans. ‘Take a few eggs,’ the recipe goes on, ‘and carefully separate the whites from the yolks. Now whisk them into the mixture.’ The whites or the yolks? We compromise with a half of each.

  ‘Fry the mixture for a few minutes over a hottish flame, until it is the colour of a walnut sideboard, and there is black edging round the shredded onion.’ The shredded onion? ‘This should have been added before the soya beans in order to prevent the milk curdling. Now quickly transfer the mixture to a cast-zinc stew-pan.’

  ‘Run out to the corner,’ shouts my wife, ‘and buy a cast-zinc stew-pan.’ I run all the way there and back. ‘You’ll have to go out again,’ she cries on my return. ‘After I’ve transferred the mixture to the cast-zinc stew-pan I’ve got to add a very large eggcupful of icing-sugar.’ Without a word of protest I run all the way back to the corner and get the icing-sugar. ‘No, no, no!’ shouts my wife as I stumble breathlessly back into the kitchen with it. ‘I’ve got the icing-sugar – I wanted you to buy the very large eggcup.’

  When I stagger painfully back into the room again with the eggcup, I find my wife sieving tiny pieces of raw meat out of the mixture. ‘The recipe,’ she sobs, ‘says: “Pour the mixture over a jam-jarful of minced beef.”’

  ‘Then why are you taking the beef out again?’

  ‘The next sentence says: “The beef should have been roasted for an hour first.”’

  We force-roast the beef, and brace ourselves for what lies ahead. ‘Place an asbestos mat beneath the dish,’ says the recipe, ‘and beat it with a wooden spoon. Continue beating until, at the bottom, the top of it is covered underneath with a grey sauce of sodden soya bean. The bottom of it should then rise out of it, coming through the top of it (the pan) until the rest of it (the bottom of it) can be separated from it, and placed in a pie-dish beaten to the consistency of thin gruel. Bake briskly. When a fine blue aromatic smoke begins to rise, the mixture is hopelessly overcooked.’

  It is quite late at night when the fine blue aromatic smoke at last curls out of the oven, and we are both very tired and weak with hunger. My wife turns over the page and reads the last sentence of the recipe: ‘Before serving, store in a cool place for at least a fortnight to allow fermentation to finish.’

  Well, well. But the canned luncheon meat, I must admit, is opened to a turn.

  (1961)

  Substance without soul

  It’s curious how plastics are so universally disliked as materials. Or perhaps not so much disliked as despised, as if they were in some way morally inferior. Everyone uses them, and everyone despises them, just as the rich use and despise the poor.

  Not you, of course, open-minded reader. I know you’ve got an entirely sensible attitude towards plastics, as towards everything else. But take me. In our house we eat off china plates, which break if you drop them. We drink out of glasses, which break if you look at them. We have plaster walls and wooden furniture, neither of which are capable of surviving the proximity of normally active human beings. How is it in your house, open-minded reader?

  Most people’s first objection to plastics, I think, would be that they frequently try to ape their betters and pass themselves off as other materials. But they disguise themselves only to avoid our contempt for plastics as plastics, and to plastics as plastics I think our principal moral objections are these:

  They don’t feel right. They’re too cold to the touch, or too warm; too smooth, or too tacky. To put it bluntly, they don’t feel like leather or stone or wood or metal. They feel like, well, like plastics.

  They’re unnatural. That is, they’re not got by hewing, mining, quarrying, smelting, tanning, or any of the other robust age-old processes by which we get proper materials. I say ‘we.’ I don’t mean ‘we’ in the sense of ‘you and I,’ of course – I don’t suppose you or I have ever done much quarrying or smelting. I mean ‘we’ in the sense of ‘someone.’

  They’re too bland. They have no grain or quirkiness – no innate character which imposes itself upon us. Like a subject race they are too obedient to be respected.

  Thus, they can be worked too easily. I don’t mean that you or I could work them. Of course we couldn’t – we haven’t got the right tools, and we couldn’t tell a polyester from a polyanthus, anyway. I mean that you don’t have to roll up your sleeves and forge plastics, or carve them, or otherwise bend them to your will by sheer physical skill, as you do with proper materials. Or as someone does.

  Dammit, they’re not produced by individual craftsmen at all. They’re turned out by faceless industrial organisations equipped with immensely expensive plant, and staffed by ordinary faceless functionaries like you and me.

  Anyway, they’re too cheap. They’re cheaper than the materials for which they’re alternatives, which is damning enough in itself; and because they’re cheaper, goods made in plastics are usually more widely distributed, to poorer people with commoner tastes.

  I’m not sure that this last objection isn’t the strongest of the lot. After all, china-clay is bland and easily-worked. Glass is
cold and unnatural. Stainless steel and diamonds are produced by immense corporations equipped with remote-controlled electric furnaces.

  Still, I dare say we shall come round to the new material eventually. We usually do. I seem to remember that when I was a child the word ‘cotton’ had a rather deprecating ring. It went with ‘thin’ and ‘flimsy,’ as in descriptions of under-nourished girls wearing cheap make-up and shivering in their thin cotton dresses. Cotton was the poor man’s substitute for wool or silk. Then they invented nylon and the rest; and now a genuine cotton shirt is the luxurious alternative to a hard-wearing, drip-dry, artificial one.

  Thatch was once endured by the poor, and is now restored by the rich. Fur-coats were no doubt regarded much like denim overalls until someone invented weaving, and hunting declined. Denim, indeed, has risen from overalls to ladies’ play-suits. Even poor old chromium plate begins to be treated with respect, now that we can look back with nostalgia from the thin chromium-plating put on cars today to the thick, rich, incorruptible stuff they trowelled on before the war.

  One can imagine with what disdain the last of the Neolithics looked upon the incoming tide of flash, cheap bronzewear; and how young married Bronze Agers kept bronze cutlery for the children, and proper flint knives, which broke if you dropped them, for their guests. And how the first grasping entrepreneurs of the Iron Age made their money selling characterless iron teaspoons in Woolworths, and spent it on buying for their own use fine antique bronze teaspoons rescued by astute dealers from the nurseries of an earlier generation.

  Not all materials make the grade – corrugated iron hasn’t for one. But I confidently expect before I die to be buying back at reassuringly high prices the plastic junk I’m throwing out now, and hanging it reverently round the antique plastic panelling. I see myself at some great age settling back in my cosy old PVC-covered swivel chair and watching a learned team on television discussing the lost glories of the Age of Plastic.

  ‘This delightful little figure of a cowboy,’ some expert will be saying, turning it over lovingly in his fingers, ‘dates from the early 1960s, and was probably given away with a breakfast food, so general was pride in art and fine craftsmanship then.

  ‘This sort of work was being done in literally hundreds of small workshops up and down the country. It’s difficult for us today, I think, to realise what a tremendous atmosphere of creative excitement there must have been in the air at that time. The whole nation must have seemed to be bursting forth into plastic song. Why, the very names of the materials those old craftsmen used are a hymn of praise in themselves – polystyrene, polyethylene, polypropylene, polymer resin, polyurethane, polyolefines; cresylics and phenolics; acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene …’

  Not like the ghastly range of materials they’ll be using by then. Unnaturally resistant to all forms of damage, with some ludicrous form of grain or texture to boot.

  And outrageously cheap.

  (1966)

  Tell us everything

  The phone rings. You pick it up. You’re a private person, in your own home. What do you say?

  You say one word. You say ‘Hello.’

  And you say it with an upward inflection, with the suggestion of a question mark at the end. This is dialogue of a succinctness and expressiveness that a playwright can only envy. With one short word you are simultaneously announcing your presence, offering a sample of your voice for identification, and asking your caller to identify himself in his turn.

  The line can be performed in all kinds of different ways. It can suggest courtesy and patience, or irritation at being interrupted. It can convey character – a confident optimist who expects every call to be good news, a suspicious pessimist who knows it’s going to be bad.

  All this with one word – ‘Hello?’ And now here is where your performance achieves true greatness. Because whichever way you said it, at this point you stop. You sense, with the instinct of the true artist, that you have said all that needs to be said, and you say no more.

  Now let’s take a slightly different situation. Once again you’re answering the phone. But this time it hasn’t rung – not yet. You’re going out, and you’re recording the response that your answering machine is going to make to calls in your absence. You press the outgoing message button – and at this point all your artistry deserts you.

  ‘Hello,’ you begin, certainly – but as soon as you’ve said it you realise you haven’t said it in the usual way. There was no upward inflection, no note of query. Your voice fell instead of rising. You have no sense of an audience. You know you are talking to yourself, and you have begun to feel rather foolish. Like an actor on a bad night, you find that your whole performance is beginning to break up around you. You are not speaking politely or impatiently, confidently or cautiously. You are speaking slowly and carefully. That unresponding audience out there … you have a sudden uneasy feeling that it may not even understand English.

  You don’t trust the text any more. And so you start to try and improve upon it. ‘You have reached 0467 22 983 3451,’ you say, very distinctly. This is odd – you’ve never announced your number to me before. You don’t need to. I know it. I’ve just dialled it. But you suspect you may not be speaking to me. You think I may be some complete stranger who has just arrived from Paraguay, ringing from a darkened phone-box with a number scribbled semi-legibly on the back of an envelope that was given him by someone he met years ago in a youth hostel in Turkey. And I may well be. But if so, why are you treating me to this great piece of oratory about having reached the number?

  Yes, this is odder still. You are speaking not just slowly and carefully – you are speaking portentously. Never mind this non-existent visitor from Paraguay – you seem to believe you are making a statement which may be used in evidence in some future court case. You are broadcasting a last message to the world from the besieged city. You are speaking to posterity. Your words will go into the archives of recorded sound, to be cracklingly broadcast and rebroadcast in the years to come over newsreel shots of the mid-nineties.

  And on you plunge. ‘There is no one here to take your call right now,’ you inform me solemnly. I believe I was beginning to guess as much. I think a faint suspicion was beginning to dawn upon even the man from Paraguay, who doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.

  ‘But,’ you say, ‘if you wish to leave a message …’

  If I wish to leave a message, I notice. Not if I merely want to. We are on a slightly higher plane of human aspiration than mere wanting. If I wish or desire to. If I am desirous of leaving a message. Well, why not, while we’re about it? But a message for whom, I ask myself. For the nation? For all mankind?

  ‘… for Warrington or Lenticula Shrubbe …’

  Oh, for my good friends Warrington or Lenticula Shrubbe! For you two! For the very people I phoned, the ones who are not there to take my call right now! How very logical!

  ‘… or for their children, Rigida and Reston …’

  Their children? Rigida and Reston? I thought they were your children! What are you telling us?

  ‘… or for Craxton Upstruck or Specula Gumm, who are contactable at this number until the 24th …’

  And who I believe are that very boring couple you met on holiday last year. Yes? Why not tell us so, then? You’ve told us everything else. Why this sudden abandonment of full public disclosure?

  But now a serious question arises. If, as you surmise might be the case, I wish, or desire, to leave a message for any of you, how on earth do I go about it? I put it in a bottle, perhaps? I go out and buy a carrier pigeon …? But what’s this I hear? You’re still speaking! You’re telling me what to do!

  ‘… then please speak clearly after the tone.’

  I see. Thank you. I am to speak – not to shout, or to whistle – and to speak clearly. I am to do it after the tone. But only, of course, if I wish to leave a message. If I am moved by a volition to communicate an intelligence. If I am not so moved, however, then I imagine I may spe
ak clearly before the tone. I may speak indistinctly, either before or after it. I may mutter to myself, before, during, and after it … I may even say nothing.

  In which case why don’t you tell me this in so many words? Why do you leave me to work it out for myself? Why not say, quite plainly: ‘If, on the other hand, you do not feel the advent of any overmastering need to communicate your thoughts to any of the aforementioned, not even to poor Specula, who never gets any messages, then you may elect to replace your receiver in silence, gently but firmly, being careful to keep it properly aligned with the base of the instrument.’

  You don’t because you’re too busy worrying about the mess I shall make of things if I do try to leave a message.

  ‘Kindly leave your name,’ you suggest.

  My name! Of course! Were desirousness of expression on my part the case then my name, indeed …

  ‘And number,’ you add.

  And number! Yes! A shrewd suggestion! Thank you!

  ‘It would also be helpful if you stated the time you called, and the date, together with the current weather conditions, and a note of your date of birth, next of kin, and National Insurance number.’

  But before I can assemble all this information you have moved on once more. And this, I think, is going to be of particular interest to me, because now we have come to the question of what you are offering to do in return for all my efforts.

  ‘We will call you back,’ you promise, ‘as soon as we can.’

  You will call me back. Yes. This is the amazing proposal that your speech has been leading up to. This is what I could never have foreseen when we started out on this great journey together.