Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill

by Gervase Phinn

  Sure enough, after the lesson the boy waved his hand in the air like a daffodil in a strong wind.

  The teacher sighed. ‘Yes Duane,’ she said. Her expression betrayed the fact that she expected that, of all the children, he would be the one to ask a question. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Can I ask you something, Miss?’ he said.

  ‘If you must,’ replied the teacher, giving me a knowing look.

  ‘Will we be having rounders this afternoon?’

  Getting up My Nose

  I was once invited to contribute to a radio phone-in on the topic: ‘What are the things that really wind you up?’

  ‘Gervase,’ asked the producer, ‘are there any things that really annoy you?’

  ‘Where shall I start?’ I asked.

  I will disclose what my irritants are a little later on but shall now reveal what the many listeners who phoned in found really annoying.

  The show had a quite exceptional response from grumpy old men and women who vented their fury on, amongst other things, litter louts, unhelpful shop assistants, chewing gum on streets and seats, automated greetings on customer care lines, slow drivers, spitting, queue jumpers, dawdlers and ditherers, cyclists and begging on streets. Other pet hates included speed cameras, loud personal stereos on public transport, white van drivers, IKEA, backpackers on trains and shoppers who fumble for money at the checkout. One of the most unusual complaints was from an elderly woman who complained about men and their ‘genital adjustments in public places’.

  I added to the list. Dog mess on the streets really really gets up my nose. Let me rephrase that – it makes my blood boil. Many dog owners are responsible, of course, and take the mess home in a plastic bag, which is the thing to do. But then there are the others. John, a neighbour of mine, was astounded to see a small hairy dog performing directly in front of his gate while the owner looked on. By the time he had put on his shoes to confront the offender, man and dog had set off down the street. Not to be deterred, my neighbour scooped up the deposit with a spade and followed the culprit until he caught up.

  ‘I think this is yours,’ he said, holding the spade at arm’s length.

  Just as well the dog wasn’t a Doberman.

  The other people who get my goat are loud mobile phone users on trains. The whole of the carriage is privy to the most personal conversations, delivered at maximum volume.

  On one London to Newcastle train, a businessman, who had commandeered the table with his Filofax, laptop, folder and briefcase, was holding forth on his mobile phone opposite a woman passenger who was clearly irritated.

  ‘Yes, darling!’ he shouted down the phone, ‘I’ll be back in Doncaster at eight. Yes, darling, the meeting went fine. No, darling, Raymond never made it. Really darling? Well, bring the Range Rover to the station. Yes, I know you’re not used to driving it, darling. Well, get Robert to reverse it out for you, darling. Yes, darling.’

  The woman had had quite enough and, snatching the phone from his hands, said into it in a loud and alluring voice, ‘Come back to bed, darling.’

  Keeping Calm

  So the story goes, Oscar Wilde was dining at the Café Royal with a group of friends and admirers. Through the elegant restaurant strode the irascible and boorish Marquess of Queensbury, the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Queensbury was carrying a rotten cabbage, which he presented to Wilde with the words, delivered loudly enough for all to hear: ‘This, sir, is what I think of you!’ There was an expectant hush amongst the diners, and all eyes looked at the celebrated wit and playwright to see his reaction. Oscar Wilde smiled, nodded and held the foul-smelling vegetable to his nose. He sniffed it dramatically.

  ‘Thank you, my lord,’ he replied serenely. ‘Whenever I smell a stinking cabbage, I shall always think of you.’

  I have a great admiration for people who can keep calm and collected in the face of a furious outburst from a rude and angry person, and manage to make a witty riposte.

  I took Christine out for a meal on her birthday to an exclusive restaurant. Everything about the evening was superb – the meal, the presentation, the ambience and the attention we received from the friendly waiters – until the man on the next table, a large, loud, red-faced and voluble individual came to settle his bill.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed your meal, sir?’ enquired the owner.

  ‘No,’ replied the man, ‘I can’t say as I have. It were far too fancy for me. I likes plain food not this nouveau riche stuff. It were not my cup of tea at all. And I have to say it were very pricey for what it was. I don’t want to get into an argument about it, but since you asked, I can’t say as how I enjoyed it.’

  ‘Get into an argument?’ repeated the owner, smiling. ‘No sir, neither do I, but were I to challenge you to a duel, I should select the English language as my weapon.’

  It amazes me how shop assistants, waiters, police officers, receptionists and traffic wardens (yes, traffic wardens have a job to do) manage to keep unruffled when faced with such people.

  Last year, I was signing books in a delightful bookshop in Cumbria. It was a veritable treasure chest, with friendly staff, superb displays and a wonderful selection of fiction, poetry and reference books.

  Into the shop came a stony-faced woman with a narrow bony face and an equally mardy-looking child in tow.

  ‘Where are the bestsellers?’ she demanded. There was no ‘please’.

  The owner smiled and showed her to the appropriate part of the shop.

  The woman plucked a tome from the shelf and sniffed noisily. ‘This is half price in Tesco’s,’ she clucked disapprovingly, before sticking it back.

  ‘Perhaps you might like to purchase it from Tesco’s, then, madam,’ replied the owner.

  ‘I don’t like this writer anyway,’ she told him, sniffing again. ‘Your books ought to be alphabeticalised,’ she told him.

  The owner’s face signalled that he was getting rather irritated but he retained the forced smile.

  The ill-tempered customer bought a guidebook, which was placed in a small brown paper bag. Then she departed. A moment later, she returned with the whinging child.

  ‘He wants a book,’ she said. ‘Where’s the children’s section?’

  The owner took a deep breath and showed her to the shelf.

  She selected a book.

  ‘May I put it in with your other book, madam?’ asked the owner. ‘It would save using another bag.’

  The woman exploded. ‘Of course I want a bag!’ She said, outraged that the owner should suggest otherwise.

  The owner produced the largest brown paper bag he could find.

  ‘That’s far too big!’ she snapped.

  ‘Please take it, madam,’ he told her.

  ‘I said it is too big,’ she repeated angrily.

  ‘Please, I insist,’ said the owner.

  ‘I said it’s too big!’ snapped the woman.

  ‘It’s not for the book, madam,’ the owner told her. ‘It’s for your head.’

  Take Care with Your Writing

  I was delighted to learn that one of my picture books, Our Cat Cuddles, was to be published across the Atlantic. I was told, however, that there had to be certain minor alterations to suit the American market: ‘Mum’ would become ‘Mom’, the ‘RSPCA’ would become ‘Animal Shelter’ and the reference to giving the kitten milk needed to be changed. They wanted to change milk? It was Oscar Wilde who observed that we British share everything with the Americans except the language, but I was intrigued, and asked my editor, somewhat naively: ‘Don’t they have milk in America?’

  ‘Children are taught in schools that it’s very bad to give cats milk,’ I was told. ‘You’ll also upset the powerful cat lobby.’ It was then pointed out to me that, when Hillary Clinton dumped the White House cat, Socks, on Betty Currie, her husband’s PA, when Bill’s term as president expired, she came in for a deal of criticism, and her abandonment of the pet could hinder her ambition to return to the White House as the
first woman president.

  The same week, I received a sharp letter from a head teacher who had heard me speak at a conference. She informed me, in a high-handed manner, that the term ‘brainstorming’, which I had used, was inadvisable. She pointed out that ‘people who have brainstorms would feel singled out and upset, and the acceptable term to use now is “thought shower” or “cloudburst”.’ She continued to inform me that the term ‘nitty-gritty’, another term I used, was ‘racist’ and that ‘it refers to the nits which covered the holds in slave ships and is deeply offensive to black people’. Then she mentioned that the bully in one of my Royston Knapper children’s stories was ‘a fat boy’ and discriminated against overweight people. As my father would have said: ‘Well, I’ll go to the bottom of our stairs!’

  I have to say that I get a bit hot under the collar when the ‘language police’ start flexing their muscles. I certainly do not wish to upset or offend anyone, but sometimes I do feel we go a tad too far with this creeping censorship of what we should or should not say.

  Well, I earnestly hope that we do not go down the road of our American cousins. According to Diane Ravitch, an educational historian and former US government official, some of the censorship imposed on books and on teachers in America is often trivial, sometimes ludicrous and, on occasion, breathtakingly stupid. In her book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, she reveals that a story entitled The Friendly Dolphin was rejected by one school committee because it discriminated against students who did not live near the sea. Another story, The Silly Old Woman, was barred because it contained the stereotype of an elderly woman. Other banned words and topics included ‘blind as a bat’ (handicapist), ‘henpecked husband’ (sexist), ‘past one’s prime’ (ageist), ‘mother cleaning the house’ (sexist), ‘bookworm’ (offensive to hard workers) and so the list goes on. One school board objected to a picture book about an old lady with too many cats. It was deemed a sexual stereotype.

  Ah me, I have an idea my little picture book, Our Cat Cuddles, has little chance of seeing the light of day across the Atlantic, and my book on dinosaurs hasn’t a cat in hell’s chance. You see, all books on dinosaurs are banned by several school committees in the southern states because they imply the theory of evolution, which is not universally accepted.

  Customers Are Not Always Right

  I took my brother-in-law and my sister out recently, to celebrate a significant birthday. We sat in the glorious sunshine outside the Cliffemount Hotel at Runswick Bay, overlooking one of Yorkshire’s most magnificent vistas: a crescent of pale yellow sand, great looming rock faces, small stone cottages with pantile roofs clinging to the cliff and tiny boats bobbing on a smooth and glassy sea. It was idyllic.

  ‘What a wonderful view,’ I said, sighing and turning to the glum-faced couple on the next table.

  ‘It’s a bit too chocolate-boxy for my liking,’ observed the woman. This reminded me of an anecdote recorded in the Countryman magazine when a Sheffield couple was asked: ‘Did you enjoy your holiday in the Lake District?’

  ‘There were nowt but watter and scenery,’ was the blunt reply.

  I related the story to the proprietor of the Cliffemount when we went in for lunch.

  ‘There’s no pleasing some people,’ she said. ‘I have had guests who seem to make a career of complaining. One resident grumbled that the sunshine was too bright in his room, another that the toilet was too noisy and a third that the birds sang too shrilly in the morning and woke her up.’ Short of arranging an eclipse, inventing a silent flush and shooting all the seagulls, there wasn’t much the proprietor could do.

  The report on holidaymakers’ genuine complaints, by the travel agency Thomas Cook, makes amusing reading. There are complaints about the beach being too sandy, the local store in Spain that didn’t sell proper biscuits like custard creams and ginger nuts, and the sea being a different colour from that in the brochure. One traveller complained that the flight from Jamaica to England took nine hours but it only took the Americans three to get home. Perhaps you can guess which country this next tourist had visited: ‘There were too many Spanish people. The receptionist spoke Spanish. The food was Spanish and there were too many foreigners.’

  There was the sightseer on honeymoon with his new wife, at a game park in Africa, who spotted a very amorous and visibly aroused elephant and complained that the beast made him feel inadequate. A guest at a Novotel hotel in Australia grumbled that his soup was too thick and strong, only to be informed that he was eating the gravy. ‘My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room,’ complained another holidaymaker, ‘but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room we had booked.’

  At the Cliffemount Hotel, we had a magnificent meal of fresh Whitby fish, sitting at a table overlooking the bay and served by a smiling and friendly waitress. The chef emerged from the kitchen to ask if we had enjoyed his efforts and, when settling the bill, I was asked by the proprietor if everything was satisfactory.

  ‘How could it be otherwise?’ I asked. ‘It was splendid.’

  She smiled. ‘You would be surprised. One guest remarked that she felt the place had no atmosphere.’

  ‘How do you manage to deal with such people?’ I asked.

  ‘By being polite,’ she said, shrugging. ‘What else can one do?’

  There is the story (probably apocryphal) about the man at the check-in at the airport, who berated the poor member of staff for a considerable period of time. The young woman behind the counter answered him calmly and politely and checked in his bags.

  ‘How do you stand for this sort of thing?’ asked the next passenger. ‘It’s disgraceful the way that man spoke to you.’

  The young woman smiled. ‘The gentleman is going to New York,’ she replied, ‘but his bags are going to Beijing.’

  The Photograph

  My sister, Christine, arrived for lunch one Sunday with the family photograph albums, which she had taken charge of when our parents died and which had been in her loft ever since. That afternoon, we spent a good couple of hours looking through the contents and reminiscing. In one album there was a collection of photographs of our father, taken before and during the last war, when he was a despatch rider. I had never seen the photographs before and was intrigued. There were two portraits, taken in a Cairo studio, of this striking-looking, serious-faced young man, his hair neatly parted and his beret tucked in regulation fashion under his epaulette, a couple of him standing to attention by a motorbike and sidecar, a group photograph of a squad of fourteen smiling soldiers in full uniform, sitting straight backed and cross-legged at Catterick Camp, and several of my father astride a horse.

  ‘What’s he doing on a horse?’ I asked my sister. ‘I never knew he could ride.’

  ‘He was in the army equestrian team,’ my sister commented casually.

  ‘I never knew that!’ I said, astounded.

  It occurred to me that Sunday afternoon that I knew very little about my father’s war service. He never spoke of it. For that matter, nor did my Uncle Alec, who was a warrant officer in the Royal Air Force and flew bombing missions over Germany, or my Uncle Jimmy, who served with the Irish Guards. My Uncle Ted, a sergeant in the Army Medical Corps and a Dunkirk veteran, only once told me about the panic and the horrors he had witnessed on the beaches as the British Army retreated. Perhaps these men had seen things that they wished to forget. I was very proud of them and still am and their medals are on the wall in my study.

  When I was a lad, my father, a great storyteller, amused and entertained me with the exciting exploits of the Three Musketeers and Biggles, Long John Silver and Rob Roy McGregor, Huckleberry Finn and Robinson Crusoe, but he never told me anything about his time in the British Army. I guess the subject was never raised. Perhaps it was too painful for him to recall or that he just wanted to return to his home and family and get on with his
life; then again, he might have considered it such an ordinary, uneventful few years of his life and therefore of not much interest to a boy keen on adventure stories.

  I do remember my father’s last Remembrance Sunday, when I accompanied him to the war memorial with my three young sons. He was in a thoughtful, sombre mood during the service, and stood a little apart from us. Richard, my eldest son, noticed as the Last Post was being played that his grandfather was in tears.

  On that special Sunday we should all, especially the young, remember those who fought and those who died in defence of our freedom. My poem is dedicated to all those brave men and women, members of today’s armed forces, who are still fighting in those ‘far-off lands of blistering heat and burning sand’ in defence of freedom, justice and humanity.

  Remembrance Sunday

  On Remembrance Sunday Grandpa cried

  For his two brothers, who had died

  In some forgotten far-off land

  Of blistering heat and burning sand.

  He touched a medal on his chest

  Which sparkled brighter than the rest:

  ‘The Africa Star,’ he gently sighed,

  ‘A badge of honour, of those who died,

  A symbol of our Ted and Jack

  Who never made the journey back.’

  We watched old soldiers stride on by,

  Straight of back and heads held high,

  And we clutched our poppies of brightest red

  And we wept for the brothers Jack and Ted.

  A Real Hero

  Like many in this country, I was appalled by the pictures in the newspapers and on the television screen of the homecoming parade of the soldiers from the 2nd battalion, The Royal Anglian Regiment, returning from serving abroad. ‘Butchers of Basra!’, ‘Cowards!’, ‘Killers!’, ‘Extremists!’, the placards proclaimed. I was deeply saddened by the sight of the grieving parents at the funeral of their son, Sapper Patrick Azimkar, murdered in Northern Ireland, a young man who pulled his friend to the ground and saved his life before he was killed. These men and women who serve in our armed forces are dedicated to help bring peace to war-torn lands and are abused and sometimes maimed and killed for trying to do so.