Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  ‘Go to antique shop—’

  ‘—in the Brompton Road—’

  ‘—in, as you say, the Brompton Road. Ask to see cow-creamer—’

  ‘—and sneer. Right. Buzz along. The door is behind you.’

  It was with a light heart that I went out into the street and hailed a passing barouche. Many men, no doubt, might have been a bit sick at having their morning cut into in this fashion, but I was conscious only of pleasure at the thought that I had it in my power to perform this little act of kindness. Scratch Bertram Wooster, I often say, and you find a Boy Scout.

  The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road and, like all antique shops except the swanky ones in the Bond Street neighbourhood, dingy outside and dark and smelly within. I don’t know why it is, but the proprietors of these establishments always seem to be cooking some sort of stew in the back room.

  ‘I say,’ I began, entering; then paused as I perceived that the bloke in charge was attending to two other customers.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ I was about to add, to convey the idea that I had horned in inadvertently, when the words froze on my lips.

  Quite a slab of misty fruitfulness had drifted into the emporium, obscuring the view, but in spite of the poor light I was able to note that the smaller and elder of these two customers was no stranger to me.

  It was old Pop Bassett in person. Himself. Not a picture.

  There is a tough, bulldog strain in the Woosters which has often caused comment. It came out in me now. A weaker man, no doubt, would have tiptoed from the scene and headed for the horizon, but I stood firm. After all, I felt, the dead past was the dead past. By forking out that fiver, I had paid my debt to Society and had nothing to fear from this shrimp-faced son of a whatnot. So I remained where I was, giving him the surreptitious once-over.

  My entry had caused him to turn and shoot a quick look at me, and at intervals since then he had been peering at me sideways. It was only a question of time, I felt, before the hidden chord in his memory would be touched and he would realise that the slight, distinguished-looking figure leaning on its umbrella in the background was an old acquaintance. And now it was plain that he was hep. The bird in charge of the shop had pottered off into an inner room, and he came across to where I stood, giving me the up-and-down through his wind-shields.

  ‘Hullo, hullo,’ he said. ‘I know you, young man. I never forget a face. You came up before me once.’

  I bowed slightly.

  ‘But not twice. Good! Learned your lesson, eh? Going straight now? Capital. Now, let me see, what was it? Don’t tell me. It’s coming back. Of course, yes. Bag-snatching.’

  ‘No, no. It was—’

  ‘Bag-snatching,’ he repeated firmly. ‘I remember it distinctly. Still, it’s all past and done with now, eh? We have turned over a new leaf, have we not? Splendid. Roderick, come over here. This is most interesting.’

  His buddy, who had been examining a salver, put it down and joined the party.

  He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breathtaking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

  But it wasn’t merely the sheer expanse of the bird that impressed. Close to, what you noticed more was his face, which was square and powerful and slightly moustached towards the centre. His gaze was keen and piercing. I don’t know if you have even seen those pictures in the papers of Dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words on the occasion of the opening of a new skittle alley, but that was what he reminded me of.

  ‘Roderick,’ said old Bassett, ‘I want you to meet this fellow. Here is a case which illustrates exactly what I have so often maintained – that prison life does not degrade, that it does not warp the character and prevent a man rising on stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things.’

  I recognised the gag – one of Jeeves’s – and wondered where he could have heard it.

  ‘Look at this chap. I gave him three months not long ago for snatching bags at railways stations, and it is quite evident that his term in jail has had the most excellent effect on him. He has reformed.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said the Dictator.

  Granted that it wasn’t quite ‘Oh, yeah?’ I still didn’t like the way he spoke. He was looking at me with a nasty sort of supercilious expression. I remember thinking that he would have been the ideal man to sneer at a cow-creamer.

  ‘What makes you think he has reformed?’

  ‘Of course he has reformed. Look at him. Well groomed, well dressed, a decent member of Society. What his present walk in life is, I do not know, but it is perfectly obvious that he is no longer stealing bags. What are you doing now, young man?’

  ‘Stealing umbrellas, apparently,’ said the Dictator. ‘I notice he’s got yours.’

  And I was on the point of denying the accusation hotly – I had, indeed, already opened my lips to do so – when there suddenly struck me like a blow on the upper maxillary from a sock stuffed with wet sand the realisation that there was a lot in it.

  I mean to say, I remembered now that I had come out without my umbrella, and yet here I was, beyond any question of doubt, umbrellaed to the gills. What had caused me to take up the one that had been leaning against a seventeenth-century chair, I cannot say, unless it was the primeval instinct which makes a man without an umbrella reach out for the nearest one in sight, like a flower groping toward the sun.

  A manly apology seemed in order. I made it as the blunt instrument changed hands.

  ‘I say, I’m most frightfully sorry.’

  Old Bassett said he was, too – sorry and disappointed. He said it was this sort of thing that made a man sick at heart.

  The Dictator had to shove his oar in. He asked if he should call a policeman, and old Bassett’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood. But he shook his head.

  ‘No, Roderick. I couldn’t. Not today – the happiest day of my life.’

  The Dictator pursed his lips, as if feeling that the better the day, the better the deed.

  ‘But listen’ I bleated, ‘it was a mistake.’

  ‘Ha!’ said the Dictator.

  ‘I thought that umbrella was mine.’

  ‘That,’ said old Bassett, ‘is the fundamental trouble with you, my man. You are totally unable to distinguish between meum and tuum. Well, I am not going to have you arrested this time, but I advise you to be very careful. Come, Roderick.’

  They biffed out, the Dictator pausing at the door to give me another look and say ‘Ha!’ again.

  A most unnerving experience all this had been for a man of sensibility, as you may imagine, and my immediate reaction was a disposition to give Aunt Dahlia’s commission the miss-in-balk and return to the flat and get outside another of Jeeves’s pick-me-ups. You know how harts pant for cooling streams when heated in the chase. Very much that sort of thing. I realised now what madness it had been to go into the streets of London with only one of them under my belt, and I was on the point of melting away and going back to the fountain head, when the proprietor of the shop emerged from the inner room, accompanied by a rich smell of stew and a sandy cat, and enquired what he could do for me. And so, the subject having come up, I said that I understood that he had an eighteenth-century cow-creamer for sale.

  He shook his head. He was a rather mildewed bird of gloomy aspect, almost entirely concealed behind a cascade of white whiskers.

  ‘You’re too late. It’s promised to a customer.’

  ‘Name of Travers?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Then that’s all right. Learn, O thou of unshuffled features and agreeable disposition,’ I said, for one likes to be civil, ‘that the above Travers is my uncle. He sent me
here to have a look at the thing. So dig it out, will you? I expect it’s rotten.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful cow-creamer.’

  ‘Ha!’ I said, borrowing a bit of the Dictator’s stuff. ‘That’s what you think. We shall see.’

  I don’t mind confessing that I’m not much of a lad for old silver, and though I have never pained him by actually telling him so, I have always felt that Uncle Tom’s fondness for it is evidence of a goofiness which he would do well to watch and check before it spreads. So I wasn’t expecting the heart to leap up to any great extent at the sight of this exhibit. But when the whiskered ancient pottered off into the shadows and came back with the thing, I scarcely knew whether to laugh or weep. The thought of an uncle paying hard cash for such an object got right in amongst me.

  It was a silver cow. But when I say ‘cow’, don’t go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence. It was about four inches high and six long. Its back opened on a hinge. Its tail was arched, so that the tip touched the spine – thus, I suppose, affording a handle for the cream-lover to grasp. The sight of it seemed to take me into a different and dreadful world.

  It was, consequently, an easy task for me to carry out the programme indicated by Aunt Dahlia. I curled the lip and clicked the tongue, all in one movement. I also drew in the breath sharply. The whole effect was that of a man absolutely out of sympathy with this cow-creamer, and I saw the mildewed cove start, as if he had been wounded in a tender spot.

  ‘Oh, tut, tut, tut!’ I said. ‘Oh, dear, dear, dear! Oh, no, no, no, no, no! I don’t think much of this,’ I said, curling and clicking freely. ‘All wrong.’

  ‘All wrong?’

  ‘All wrong. Modern Dutch.’

  ‘Modern Dutch?’ He may have frothed at the mouth, or he may not. I couldn’t be sure. But the agony of spirit was obviously intense. ‘What do you mean, Modern Dutch? It’s eighteenth-century English. Look at the hallmark.’

  ‘I can’t see any hallmark.’

  ‘Are you blind? Here, take it outside in the street. It’s lighter there.’

  ‘Right ho,’ I said, and started for the door, sauntering at first in a languid sort of way, like a connoisseur a bit bored at having his time wasted.

  I say ‘at first’, because I had only taken a couple of steps when I tripped over the cat, and you can’t combine tripping over cats with languid sauntering. Shifting abruptly into high, I shot out of the door like someone wanted by the police making for the car after a smash-and-grab raid. The cow-creamer flew from my hands, and it was a lucky thing that I happened to barge into a fellow citizen outside, or I should have taken a toss in the gutter.

  Well, not absolutely lucky, as a matter of fact, for it turned out to be Sir Watkyn Bassett. He stood there goggling at me with horror and indignation behind the pince-nez, and you could almost see him totting up the score on his fingers. First, bag-snatching, I mean to say; then umbrella-pinching; and now this. His whole demeanour was that of a man confronted with the last straw.

  ‘Call a policeman, Roderick!’ he cried, skipping like the high hills.

  The Dictator sprang to the task.

  ‘Police’ he bawled.

  ‘Police!’ yipped old Bassett, up in the tenor clef.

  ‘Police!’ roared the Dictator, taking the bass.

  And a moment later something large loomed up in the fog and said: ‘What’s all this?’

  Well, I dare say I could have explained everything, if I had stuck around and gone into it, but I didn’t want to stick around and go into it. Side-stepping nimbly, I picked up the feet and was gone like the wind. A voice shouted ‘Stop! but of course I didn’t. Stop, I mean to say! Of all the damn silly ideas. I legged it down byways and along side streets, and eventually fetched up somewhere in the neighbourhood of Sloane Square. There I got aboard a cab and started back to civilisation.

  My original intention was to drive to the Drones and get a bite of lunch there, but I hadn’t gone far when I realised that I wasn’t equal to it. I yield to no man in my appreciation of the Drone Club . . . its sparkling conversation, its camaraderie, its atmosphere redolent of all that is best and brightest in the metropolis . . . but there would, I knew, be a goodish bit of bread thrown hither and thither at its luncheon table, and I was in no vein to cope with flying bread. Changing my strategy in a flash, I told the man to take me to the nearest Turkish bath.

  It is always my practice to linger over a Turkish b., and it was consequently getting late by the time I returned to the flat. I had managed to put in two or three hours’ sleep in my cubicle, and that, taken in conjunction with the healing flow of persp. in the hot room and the plunge into the icy tank, had brought the roses back to my cheeks to no little extent. It was, indeed, practically with a merry tra-la-la on my lips that I latchkeyed my way in and made for the sitting-room.

  And the next moment my fizziness was turned off at the main by the sight of a pile of telegrams on the table.

  (1938)

  Ken Follett has sold more than 155 million books worldwide. His first bestseller was Eye of the Needle (1978), a spy story set during the Second World War. In 1989, he published The Pillars of the Earth, a novel about building a cathedral in the Middle Ages, which has since sold more than twenty-five million copies in many languages. More recently, the Century trilogy of historical novels – Fall of Giants (2010), Winter of the World (2012) and Edge of Eternity (2014) – told the story of the twentieth century through the eyes of five families.

  ★

  The Early Morning

  by Hilaire Belloc

  The moon on the one hand, the dawn on the other:

  The moon is my sister, the dawn is my brother.

  The moon on my left and the dawn on my right.

  My brother, good morning; my sister, good night.

  (1896)

  ★

  The Memorial Gates stand at the top of London’s Constitution Hill, between Buckingham Palace’s high-walled garden and gridlocked Hyde Park Corner, where pedestrian crossings have not only red and green stickmen but also red and green stick-horses (for The Household Cavalry).

  Erected in 2002 – inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II during her Golden Jubilee – the austere gateposts bear an overdue tribute to the countless servicemen who sacrificed their lives in the name of Empire, lest we forget: ‘In memory of the five million volunteers from the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean who fought with Britain in the two World Wars.’

  Amid this pomp, angled between the shadows of inglorious colonial history, another inscription lurks – Nigerian writer Ben Okri’s seven words are stark, yet blossom as brightly as Green Park’s daffodils in springtime:

  OUR FUTURE IS GREATER THAN OUR PAST

  The Message

  by Ben Okri

  1

  You arrive dirty and hungry. You are covered in grime. You have come from beyond the snowline. It has been an epic journey.

  You have travelled through forests, through innumerable cities and villages, barely stopping, travelling mostly on foot, with no change of clothes.

  You have come through regions where you were unfamiliar with the language and the customs. You have slept at roadsides, in strange inns. You have travelled alone, bearing a message which only you can carry.

  How long have you been travelling? You don’t know. Maybe your whole life.

  You forego pleasures on the way. It’s been hard enough just keeping on the journey. You have travelled nights without sleeping, days without eating. Your destination is your rest and your food. Your mission is to arrive at the court, deliver the message, and then to be free.

  Many countries you have crossed, wolves you have battled, hard men you have transcended, cunning men you have eluded, seducing women you have slithered away from.

  Yout
h deserted you in the virgin forests; and yet you travelled with youth, and never lost it. Youth remains in you, in your freedom and the simplicity of your spirit. Encased in the dirt of the road is your preserved freshness.

  2

  The last part of your journey was the worst. Getting closer was also getting farther. It is easier to get lost within sight of the palace. It is easier to feel one has arrived when one sees the battlements and turrets, the flags and banners of the castle. Then in renewed hope and exultation one hurries. And yet the way is still far. Distances are deceptive. Hope makes all things near, and so can prove treacherous.

  You kept your eyes on the road. You nearly got lost in the village. You were tempted to stay the night, to divulge your destination to an old woman, and thus be given conflicting or self-serving advice. But you kept it to yourself. You imagined you were still at the beginning of your journey. You were conscious that it was still full of perils, and that you still had a long way to go.

  Your whole life had been the journey. If you stopped to think now, or confess despair, who knows what snares of your own making you would fall into. So you staked your life on the journey. You might have died on it, but you were vigilant. You took each moment as the whole. That’s what you did.

  3

  And then you found you had arrived. You were in the court. You were in the place. In the grime and dirt of the journey the message was divested of you. It was painless. You didn’t even know what it was. The message was on you. The message was in your dirt, on your unwashed body, in your weary but alive spirit. The message was in your eyes. It was in your arrival, in your dreams, in your memory. It was in all you had brought, and the nothing that you had brought.

  The message was divested of you. It was shorn off you, and you were light. You were cleaned up of your message. You were scrubbed and shaved of it, bathed and washed of it. The filthy clothes were taken off you, and you were given new ones that shone like light.