Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill

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Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill Page 21

by Gervase Phinn


  ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ came the reply.

  ‘And have you any children?’

  ‘Two – a boy and a girl. Grown up now, of course. Have you?’

  ‘Have I?’ asked Mrs Thatcher, rather startled.

  ‘Children,’ repeated the woman. ‘Have you any children?’

  ‘Yes I do,’ said the PM. ‘I too have a son and a daughter.’

  ‘And what are they called?’ enquired the elderly lady.

  ‘Mark and Carol. Tell me dear,’ said Mrs Thatcher, looking the woman in the eyes, and asking, with a sympathetic smile on her lips: ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘No love,’ replied the old lady, ‘but Matron will tell you.’

  As a visiting professor of education, I lecture at various universities. At one university, when the examination period came around, lecturers were told to be extra vigilant and keep a keen eye out for any cheating or ‘flouting of the rubric’. One of my colleagues, invigilating an examination, explained to the students sitting their finals that, when he told them to stop writing, they must put down their pens immediately. One young man continued writing after the order had been given and, when he came to hand in his paper, the invigilator refused to accept it.

  ‘You were still writing,’ he told the student, as he collected together a huge pile of papers.

  ‘I was merely writing my name,’ explained the student.

  ‘Nevertheless, you were writing and your paper will have to go to the Dean of the Faculty for his decision.’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ demanded the student angrily.

  ‘No, I do not,’ replied the invigilator.

  ‘Take a closer look,’ said the student. ‘Do you know to whom you are speaking?’

  ‘No!’ snapped the invigilator. ‘I do not know who you are!’

  ‘Thank goodness for that,’ said the student, and pushed his paper into the middle of the pile.

  Celebrity Status

  I was recording my fourth Dales book in Bath, and booked into the hotel near the studio where the readers usually stayed. Behind the reception desk, signed photographs of famous actors and celebrities who had stayed there were displayed, each with various complimentary comments scrawled across them.

  ‘You have a studio booking?’ the pleasant young receptionist enquired.

  ‘Yes I do,’ I replied.

  ‘And you’ll be at the recording studio all day tomorrow?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Could I ask you a favour?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She gestured behind her, to the hall of fame. ‘It’s just that we usually have signed photographs of the famous people who read at the studio displayed on the wall.’ Above her were signed photographs of distinguished actors and politicians, broadcasters and television stars.

  ‘I should be delighted—’ I began.

  She cut me short. ‘We’ve got Greg Wise staying at the hotel.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘You know, Greg Wise, the actor. He’s married to Emma Thompson.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, recalling the dashing, darkly handsome Mr John Willoughby in the film version of Sense and Sensibility, the man who rescues Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet) when she gets caught in the rainstorm and sprains her ankle. He turns out to be a bit of a cad and later deserts her to marry for money.

  ‘Well,’ continued the receptionist, ‘he’s staying here and he’s recording at the same studio tomorrow. Could you ask him if we could have a photograph? I just went weak at the knees when he booked in. I was lost for words.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I replied. It was clear that there was little chance of my photograph joining the great and good on the wall behind reception.

  Greg Wise was a most charming and unassuming man, and readily agreed to the request to have his photograph taken. In fact, he was extremely courteous when people approached him for his autograph or to tell him how much they enjoyed the films and television programmes in which he had appeared.

  ‘I suppose it’s part of having an easily recognisable face,’ he confided in me. ‘A little tiresome at times when you want to get about your business and people keep on coming up to you. But I don’t mind really.’

  One evening, as we ate a meal in the hotel restaurant, I was conscious of people staring, pointing and discussing him and, as we got up to go, several approached him for his autograph.

  ‘Are you his agent?’ one man asked me.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I replied, rather peevishly, ‘and I’m not his father either.’

  It was the last day of recording and we were setting off for the studio when two elderly women caught sight of us crossing the small square to the front of the hotel. I saw one of them point at us and another scrabble in her handbag for a pen.

  ‘Here we go again,’ said Greg. ‘I’m really sorry about this.’

  The elderly couple approached, but looked past my companion and straight at me.

  ‘It’s Gervase Phinn, isn’t it?’ said one of the women.

  ‘It is,’ I replied.

  ‘I thought it was you. I said to my friend, that’s Gervase Phinn.’

  ‘We heard you speak at the Women’s Institute AGM last year,’ said her companion.

  ‘And we’ve read all your books,’ added the other. ‘Do you think we could have your autograph?’

  I turned to Greg Wise. ‘Ah, what it is to be famous,’ I said smugly.

  Didn’t They Do Well?

  I was greeted at the entrance of the exclusive Simpson’s in the Strand by a member of staff, a young woman in a smart grey suit.

  ‘Mr Phinn?’ she enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, surprised to be recognised.

  ‘The manager would like to see you in his office, sir, if you would like to follow me.’

  I was at this sumptuous hotel to speak at the ‘Oldie Luncheon’ for Richard Ingram, along with Barry Cryer and John Julius Norwich, and could not for the life of me think what the manager wanted.

  ‘Me?’ I asked. ‘He wants to see me?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know what it is about?’

  ‘No sir. He just said it was important that you see him.’

  In his plush office, the manager rose from his chair and smiled warmly. He was elegantly dressed in a dark jacket, pin-stripe trousers, crisp white shirt and grey silk tie.

  ‘Mr Phinn,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘How very good to see you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, intrigued.

  ‘Do sit down,’ said the manager. He smiled. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ he continued.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

  ‘Stephen Busby. You used to teach me.’

  ‘Stephen Busby,’ I sighed. I saw in the man’s face the child I taught some thirty or so years before – that small, bright-eyed, good-natured little boy who sat at the front desk. It’s a cliché, I know, but I knew he would go far.

  ‘I always enjoyed your lessons,’ he told me. ‘My sister Ann is coming down later this morning to see you. You taught her as well.’

  I remembered Ann, my star pupil, whose work was imaginative, beautifully neat and accurate. She went on to get top grades in her examinations.

  ‘She works for the BBC World Service now,’ my former pupil told me. ‘She’s really looking forward to seeing you again.’

  Teachers always feel that small tingle of pride when meeting former pupils who have done well in life. They feel perhaps they have had some small part in their successes. I have to admit that I guess I have not had such a positive influence on some of my other former pupils.

  Some weeks later, I was shopping in Rotherham when I was approached by a bear of man with a tangle of curls and a great bushy beard, sporting a selection of aggressively colourful tattoos on his arms. He was holding the hand of a small boy of about eight or nine.

  ‘Hey up, Mester Phinn,’ he said. ‘Does tha remem
ber me?’

  I remembered this former pupil only too well. He was often in trouble for fighting, answering teachers back, failing to do his homework, truanting and being generally a real nuisance. Teachers tend to recall the difficult and demanding youngsters and I certainly recalled this particular wayward and disobedient young man.

  ‘I do, it’s Johno, isn’t it?’

  ‘Aye, that’s reight. Does tha remember when I answered thee back and I got caned?’

  Oh dear, I thought, this might get ugly. ‘I don’t,’ I said, feebly.

  ‘Aye, well I do, and it bloody well hurt.’

  ‘Well, you see—’ I began to try and explain.

  ‘I deserved it, reight enough,’ he interrupted. ‘Oh aye, I deserved it, all reight. I were allus in trouble for one thing or t’other and I’ll tell thee what, Mester Phinn, if teachers today were like t’ones I ’ad when I were at school, stricter like, then we wunt ’ave all this yobbish behaviour. It never did me no ’arm.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I agreed. I was not inclined to argue with the giant. ‘And who is this young man?’ I asked, smiling at the glum-faced little boy staring up at me with large wide eyes.

  ‘Him? This is our Kyle,’ I was told. ‘Mi grandson.’

  ‘Grandson?’ I repeated.

  ‘Aye, I’ve got eight.’

  ‘Eight,’ I mouthed. I suddenly felt very old.

  Digging the Garden

  I was positioned at the very entrance to a massive bookshop, sitting at a small table, surrounded by towers of books and feeling not a little embarrassed. People passed and glanced in my direction but not a soul stopped to talk to me or to buy. Then an elderly couple approached. They observed me for an inordinate amount of time, as if I were some rather strange specimen in a museum case.

  ‘Are you anybody?’ asked the woman eventually. She was dressed in a thick black coat with a multicoloured headscarf wrapped around her head and tied in an enormous knot under her chin.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I asked pleasantly.

  ‘Are you anybody? ’Ave you been on anything?’

  ‘No,’ I replied simply.

  ‘Do you know who he is, Ron?’ the woman enquired of her companion, a small man in a flat cap with the face the colour and texture of a mouldering russet apple.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he replied.

  ‘What’s it about?’ asked the woman, picking up my book and flicking through the pages.

  ‘It’s about my life as a school inspector in the Yorkshire Dales.’ She screwed up her face. ‘It’s a humorous account of the children and teachers I have met – sort of gentle, life affirming, observational writing. There’s no sex and violence and bad language,’ I added.

  ‘Doesn’t sound my cup of tea,’ remarked the woman, putting down the book.

  ‘Cookery books sell,’ the man told me.

  ‘And gardening books,’ added the woman. ‘Person they ’ad ’ere last time wrote one of them gardening books and there was a queue right out the door and round the corner.’

  ‘Mind you,’ said the man, ‘it were somebody.’

  ‘Really,’ I sighed. ‘Who was that then?’

  ‘Charlie Dimmock,’ the woman told me.

  ‘And what’s he got that I haven’t?’ I asked, mischievously.

  The woman shook her head. ‘It’s a woman,’ she told me.

  ‘And she digs the garden without a bra,’ added the man.

  ‘So do I,’ I said.

  The man threw back his head and laughed. ‘Aye, but you ’aven’t got what Charlie Dimmock’s got.’

  My mother always advised me never to try and be clever with people. It never pays off. I should have heeded her advice.

  ‘So, is that the main criterion for writing a book then?’ I enquired.

  ‘What?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Digging a garden without a bra?’

  She thought for a moment before sharing her thoughts. ‘It might not be, love,’ she told me with a small smile playing on her lips, ‘but I reckon she sold more books than you’re ever going to sell. Come on Ron.’

  And with that they departed, leaving me sitting by my lonely self amidst the piles of unsold books.

  The Curse

  When my first Dales book, The Other Side of the Dale, was published I was understandably very excited to see it in the shops and to read the reviews in the papers. Christine and I were staying at a hotel in the Yorkshire Dales and were joined for dinner that evening by my editor, Jenny Dereham, and the writer and broadcaster, Mike Harding, and his wife. In the corner of the lounge sat an elderly woman, engrossed in reading the very book.

  ‘Why don’t you tell her you’ve written it,’ urged my dinner companions. ‘I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to meet the author.’

  I took little persuading and approached the woman.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said pleasantly. ‘You perhaps aren’t aware but that is my book that you are reading.’

  ‘I think not,’ said the woman tartly. ‘I borrowed it from my sister. And if you do find your copy I wouldn’t bother reading it – it’s not up to much.’

  Borrowed books are a sensitive subject for me.

  My brother-in-law, Keith, is something of a bibliomaniac – his nose is forever in a novel or a biography and his house has wall-to-wall shelving in virtually every room, all crammed with books. He has one golden rule when it comes to his treasured books: never ever lend them to anyone. ‘Invariably,’ he says, ‘those who do never see them again and if the books are returned they are stained with sun-tan lotion or coffee or have the corners of the pages turned down or the spines hanging off.’

  I do wish my dear wife Christine would take a leaf out of Keith’s book, if you will excuse the metaphor. I have a study at home which has its fair share of tomes but time and time again I will be searching the shelves for a particular book and, having been unsuccessful and enquiring of Christine if she has seen it, my dear wife will say: ‘Oh, I lent The Kite Runner to Margaret’, or: ‘If you’re looking for the Basil Hume biography, Mum’s got it’, or: ‘I let Anne borrow the Michael Dobbs.’

  ‘Christine,’ I say with exasperation in my voice, ‘will you please, please ask me first when you lend people my books, and if you feel compelled to loan them out will you ask for them to be returned?’ Of course, the books rarely are returned and I have to go out and buy another copy, which, being a thrifty Yorkshireman, does not go down well at all.

  The pasting of a bookplate at the front of my books, with EX LIBRIS printed in red and, just for good measure, stating that the book is the property of Gervase Phinn and could it please be returned, I am afraid has had little effect. I have now resorted to placing in each loaned book a copy of the splendid Spanish Curse on Book Thieves, discovered in the library of the monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, and I have to say that now my books are returned pretty promptly.

  For him that stealeth or borroweth and returneth not

  This book from its owner,

  Let it change into a venomous serpent in his hand and rend him.

  Let him be struck down with palsy and all his members blasted.

  Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy

  And let there be no surcease to this agony ’til he sing in dissolution.

  Let bookworms gnaw his entrails

  And when at last he goeth to his last punishment,

  Let the flames of hell consume him forever.

  A Character of Fiction

  ‘We’ve been having a little contretemps about you,’ said the very elegant elderly woman at a literary luncheon. She turned to her equally elegant companion. ‘Have we not, Patricia?’

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed her friend.

  ‘Could you settle our difference of opinion?’ she continued, resting a heavily bejewelled hand on my sleeve.

  ‘If I can,’ I replied.

  ‘Where did you acquire your soubriquet?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your cognom
en, your pen-name, your nom de plume?’

  ‘Obviously, Gervase Phinn is clearly not your real name,’ added her companion.

  ‘It’s so very literary, like a character from Dickens. I said to Doris that I think it comes from Trollope – Phineas Finn – but my friend here thinks you acquired it from Edmund Crispin’s novel, Love Lies Bleeding, in which the main protagonist is the sleuth, Professor Gervase Fen.’

  ‘It’s my real name,’ I told them, smiling.

  Doris arched an eyebrow. ‘How very singular,’ she said.

  ‘However did you manage, growing up in Rotherham?’ enquired her friend.

  I was relating this conversation to another speaker at the luncheon. My fellow writer gave a wry smile. ‘Well, can you imagine what I had to put up with?’ replied David Nobbs.

  Gervase is a name which appears quite frequently in historical romantic fiction, but he surfaces as a thoroughly bad lot. The name is usually given to aberrant aristocrats, narcissistic, dandified poseurs and devious, upper-crust and well-connected villains. Rather than the Regency buck, with his coal black curls, swarthy skin, dark smouldering eyes and tight-fitting britches, the Gervase of literature inevitably turns out to be a bloated, raddled old roué with quivering jowls, a wet handshake and extremely questionable habits.

  In Slightly Tempted (a story of ‘sparkling courtship, scandalous passion and all-consuming love’) by Mary Balogh, Lord Gervase Ashford is the notorious rake, intent on ravishing the beautiful Lady Morgan Bedwyn. In The Faun’s Folly by Sandra Heath, Lord Gervase Mowbray, Duke of Wroxham, is only marginally better. Georgette Heyer, in The Quiet Gentleman, had a central character called Gervase, Earl of St Erith and, in The Queen’s Man, by Sharon Kay, Gervase Fitz Randolph is no better than he should be. In Mistress Wilding, by Rafael Sabatini, portly Sir Gervase Scoresby is not someone to be trifled with and, in Mr Castonel, the eponymous hero is Mr Gervase Castonel: ‘It was a prepossessing face; it was silent, pale and unfathomable with grey impenetrable eyes that disliked the look of you; and dark hair.’ Mary Jo Putney, in her romantic saga, Dearly Beloved, paints a picture of a cold and brittle man who prefers his own company to that of others:

  In spite of their physical closeness, Gervase was remote from her, his expression harsh and withdrawn. Diana leaned across the narrow gap for a light kiss, asking softly, ‘Is something wrong?’

 

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