Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country

by Tony Hawks

  ‘Please, Titch!’ I pleaded. ‘Please! Stay still for two more minutes. Then we’ll stop.’

  And so it was, with my left hand supporting a small pig beneath my coat, and my right squeezing the brake with all its strength whilst doing its best to keep the bike balanced, that we whizzed down the perilously steep hill into Ilfracombe.

  It was an experience I never ever want to repeat. It was a close thing, but we made it to the bottom of the hill in one piece, possibly because Titch seemed to respond to the desperate pleading tone in my voice. At the first set of traffic lights we came to, I dismounted and lifted the bike onto the pavement, propping it against the wall. I let out an audible sigh of relief. I had known that this journey could be uncomfortable. I had known that this journey could involve some suffering, but I never imagined that it could be dangerous. And I certainly never imagined that it could be life-threatening.

  ‘Thank you, Titch,’ I said, as I gave her an almighty hug, having removed her from the bottom of my coat, where she’d been hanging precariously during our hazardous descent. ‘We made it. Thank you. Thank you for not getting us both killed.’

  After all, she was too young to die, and I was too handsome.

  10

  Countdown

  Rod – roughly my age, jovial, warm and welcoming in his sleeveless jumper – stood on the porch of Varley House, a well-ordered Victorian guest house with sea views (from the upper rooms). Rod was exactly the kind of host you wanted to meet after you’d had a long, wet, windy, and ultimately unnerving cycle. He was also pleasingly nonchalant about the arrival of a pig. He waited happily whilst I hovered over Titch in his hotel’s front garden, hoping that she’d relieve herself. When she did, I repressed my urge for a triumphant punch to the air, choosing instead to attempt to give the impression that I was completely in control of this pig. Little did Rod know how close Titch had been to hospitalising the pair of us just half an hour earlier.

  ‘I’ll show you both to your room,’ said Rod, with an unexpected deference to livestock.

  ‘Brilliant, Rod,’ I said, ‘this is so kind of you.’

  ‘Happy to help the charity.’

  Several days earlier, Rod had offered a complimentary room and breakfast, within only five minutes of my having sent out an email appeal to the many hoteliers of Ilfracombe. I had been honest enough to reveal in my mail that I had a pig in tow. It hadn’t put Rod off.

  ‘You should both be happy in there,’ he said, pointing into the spacious Room 6.

  I set Titch down on the floor and we watched as she proceeded to sniff around the room, like she was a seasoned traveller. She seemed to be doing the pig equivalent of what we humans do when we check out where the tea- and coffee-making facilities are, identify the whereabouts of the hairdryer, or snoop around the bathroom checking the complimentary miniature toiletries, assessing how many we should take with us when we leave.

  ‘What are you doing for dinner?’ asked a smiling Rod, as he viewed my little friend with interest.

  ‘I was going to wander into Ilfracombe and find a restaurant, I guess.’

  ‘Would you like to join us? My family have arrived and we’re going to have a Christmas dinner. We’re eating early, so you’ll have time to explore Ilfracombe afterwards.’

  ‘That would be lovely, thanks.’

  How extraordinarily hospitable, I thought. Pigs clearly bring out the best in people. I did have some reservations about joining them, though, feeling a little like a gatecrasher, but there was something so soothing and warming about a Christmas dinner, and I needed comfort after the journey I’d just had.

  An hour later, I was sitting round an extremely large table with seven people I’d never met before, wearing one of those ridiculous paper party hats that are generously provided within eternally overpriced and disappointing crackers. I wonder if this is what I enjoy most about this kind of travel – the fact that you simply have no idea what you will be doing next, or whom you will be meeting.

  I’ve never been fond of the expression ‘expect the unexpected’, mainly because I have a pedantic problem of logic with it. (Once you’re expecting it, doesn’t it cease to be unexpected?) However, there’s certainly some truth in the way you can cherish the unpredictability that a journey like this can bring. One is forced to ‘go with the flow’. In order to make your journey joyous, you accept invitations, you follow advice, you call people up that others have suggested you contact. In short, you allow yourself to become the vehicle that takes you on your journey, and your fuel is the people you meet along the way.

  That’s why I had a silly paper hat on.

  Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without silly paper hats. Not that it was Christmas anyway – it was 17 December. Yes, it’s normal to have a work Christmas party long before Christmas (some even begin in November – quelle horreur), but family gatherings normally have to wait until Jesus’s birthday.1 Rod, however, had been forced to improvise, since his daughter and family were visiting early as they had to be in Surrey over Christmas, because hubby had to work.

  I was impressed by the fact that there were four generations at the table. Rod’s wife’s mum, Rod and his wife’s daughter, and Rod and his wife’s daughter’s son. Impressive work, especially as the great grandmum didn’t look that old to me.

  At first, I felt a little out of place in this setting. The conversation didn’t seem to flow too well, and I wondered if I was preventing everyone from doing what families do so well when they get together over a few drinks.

  Arguing.

  It was all very polite. I asked a lot of questions. Rod, it turned out, had just completed a brush with showbusiness, having been a winner on Countdown for the previous five days, and holding the honour of being the current champion going into the New Year. I asked if he was confident of winning again, at which point he revealed a state secret: he’d already lost his next show, but it hadn’t yet been broadcast. I promised not to tell anyone – a secret that I would find surprisingly easy to keep.

  For those of you who are not British and don’t know Countdown as being the stalwart quiz game of British television (it was the first show broadcast on Channel 4 in 1982),2 here’s the gist of it: the contestants are given a load of numbers and a pile of letters and are encouraged to arse about with them until a studio audience applaud knowingly and the presenter and guests comment smugly.

  It’s a winning formula and a show not to be missed, if you like staring at a screen and experiencing bemusement and a sense of your own inferiority.

  Self-consciously, and without anything approaching gay abandon, we pulled our adjacent crackers, adjusted our paper hats, read out the feeble jokes, and wondered at the small plastic toys that were immediately ready for recycling the moment they were in our hands. We had all the seasonal, pointless paraphernalia, but it still didn’t feel very Christmassy.

  Only after the main course did the subject of Titch and the coast-to-coast cycle come up, and I was urged to fetch Titch from the room and let her join us. This made a world of difference. It turns out that a small piglet snorting and foraging around the room can create informality just as well as a round of gin and tonics. Her introduction was greeted with a chorus of ‘Isn’t she cute!’ and intense fascination from the toddler, Callum, who followed her around, but couldn’t quite muster the courage to bend down and pick her up. (Great news for Titch. Toddlers no doubt mean well, but are probably responsible for more abuses of animal welfare than the Japanese whaling industry and Spanish toreadors put together.)

  Amidst this fresh conviviality, new and more diverse conversations were struck up, and soon I revealed that Fran was six months pregnant.

  ‘Have you found out what sex it is?’ asked Rod’s daughter. ‘Not that it necessarily makes any difference.’

  It turned out that they were one of the 4 per cent that got duff info from the hospital. They’d been told to expect a girl, so imagine their surprise when she gave birth to a boy. I imagined the double take w
hen they saw the penis. Perhaps the only double take that penis would ever get. Who knows?

  ‘We had a whole room done out in pink, and loads of clothes that were no use.’

  This made me feel that Fran and I had been right to allow the sex of our future child to remain a mystery. Not that we were about to paint any room pink, blue, or any other colour. So far – and this could change – it seemed that we were going to do what needed doing when it needed doing, and not before. Currently, my only preparation for fatherhood had been to clear the diary for the first three months after the baby was born. During that period, I was no longer available for weddings, parties and bar mitzvahs.

  Rod’s son-in-law, who had become a father before me, despite looking young enough to be my son, began chatting, and told me that he worked for McLaren in Woking. Apparently they sold luxury cars to film stars, footballers, celebrities and anyone else who had more money than social conscience.

  ‘Jay Leno just bought one. I think he paid about £800,000 for it.’

  I nearly spat out my mince pie.

  The amazing thing is that Jay Leno got a bargain compared to the most expensive new car of 2013 – the Lamborghini Veneno, which could be purchased for a mere £2.5 million. Even more amazing is that new cars are cheaper than the vintage ones. Just two months before I set off on this trip (on a mode of transport that costs less than the Lamborghini’s ashtray) the car collector Paul Pappalardo sold his Ferrari 250 GTO for £32 million.

  When I learn this kind of stuff, it makes me feel a little nauseous. For all the amazing advances we’ve made in society – in healthcare, social reform, technology and human rights – I still find it staggering that we live in a world where it’s socially acceptable for one man to spend this amount of money on a car, while others starve. Plainly we’ve got a bit more advancing to do before it’s job done and Jesus can pop back down and say, ‘Well done, chaps.’

  ***

  After dinner I was faced with the task of getting Titch tucked up in her little pet carrier, so that I could wander into Ilfracombe and take a look around. Titch, however, was alarmingly like a small child who’d become excited by the recent presence of visiting guests. She seemed stimulated, and was unwilling to bed down in her carrier for the night. She kept getting straight out again and foraging round the room, making grunting noises. I wasn’t sure whether Rod had told the other guests in the hotel that he had a pig staying over in Room 6, so leaving a grunting pig unattended while I went out didn’t seem the best way to repay his hospitality.

  Then I remembered something that Chris had told me at one point, when I’d collected Titch.

  ‘If you ever want to calm her down, then massage her just behind the ears. You can use hand cream, or moisturiser. She loves it.’

  So it was that I reached for the moisturising lotion that I had packed specifically for Titch, read the label and checked that it didn’t say anything about not using it on pigs, and squirted some behind Titch’s ears. The massage that followed was not a pleasurable experience for me, since Titch’s skin was far more lumpy and barnacled than I might have expected. However, the effect on her was quite magical. After a couple of minutes, this oddest of rituals reached a climax when her eyes began to close, and soon she was out for the count. I covered her with blankets and tiptoed out for the night with a stirring feeling in my heart. Clearly I was demonstrating excellent aptitude for fatherhood.

  It was about a twenty-minute walk into the centre of Ilfracombe from Varley House, and thankfully, the wintry rain had eased off. It was dark and I couldn’t see a great deal, but I could hear the distant crashing of the waves on the cliffs of nearby Hillsborough. Known locally as the ‘sleeping elephant’, this promontory (funnily enough, not that different in profile to the shape of a sleeping elephant) is also a nature reserve and the site of an Iron Age fort. I made a promise to myself to return one day and visit it at a more suitable time. Like, in the daylight.

  On the way into town, I did what many people do now when they are out walking, I took out my mobile phone and made a call. I am fully aware of how these ingenious miniature communication portals have begun to be the objects we reach for when nothing particularly stimulating is happening in our lives. Recently, on a train, I had noted that every other passenger around me was either talking, texting or playing a game on their phone. On another occasion, a while back, I’d been in a restaurant in Pittsburgh adjacent to a table where four girls had gone out for a meal together. All of them were busy looking at their mobile phones, and were tapping away at them. I wondered if this had now become preferable to talking, and that they were sending messages to each other instead.

  The soup looks gr8. Are we having starters? :)

  In the days of my youth, I would have had to queue outside a phone box for twenty minutes, listening to someone have a row with their boyfriend, before I could have told Fran that I was OK, and that Titch was safely sound asleep in a lovely, cosy room. No such inconvenience now. Like most of the rest of us, I could now combine travel with communication, meaning that time wasn’t wasted.

  Wasted time.

  As I walked down to Ilfracombe’s picture-book pretty harbour, I gave a moment’s thought to this notion. In our culture, we have created language that illustrates how we view time, like nearly everything else, as a commodity. Time is just something else that we consume. We judge it too. Some time we see as ‘well-used’, other time we view as ‘wasted’. Time can also be bought and sold. We have created hourly rates for our time. Cheeky lawyers may even bill you for chatting to you about the weather or how your holiday was. Time is money.

  I cut down a path, aiming to get to the harbour that I could see glistening in the distance, and I ended up by a little cove where the water gently lapped onto the shore, reflecting the moonlight. To my right, I could faintly make out the silhouette of a sleeping elephant jutting into the sea. To my left, a tourist notice informed me of Ilfracombe’s less reputable past. Smuggling.

  Even though the north coast of Devon was not favourable for landings, with its heavy surf and exposed coves, these shores had the advantage of rarely being patrolled by the revenue vessels, who were busy keeping an eagle eye on the south coast. Place names in the Ilfracombe area bear witness to the town’s connections with the smuggling trade. On the east side of the town there’s an inlet called Brandy Cove, and to the west, Samson’s Cove, named after an infamous local smuggler. As I walked the coastal path towards the bright lights of the quayside, I imagined the tough lives that these smugglers must have had, and I wondered how long I would have lasted if I’d been born into those cruel and harsh times.

  ‘Aha, Master Hawks, and what can ye offer our crew of smugglers?’ chief smuggler Samson might have asked of me.

  ‘Well, I don’t have a huge amount of smuggling experience, but I do have a nice, gentle wit, and as we near shore with our cargo of illegal contraband, I could keep morale up with a host of wry observations.’

  ‘I see. Wicked John, run the cutlass up ’is arse. Let’s see how wry ’e is about that.’

  Happily, I was able to enjoy the delightful old fishing port completely free of what sustains it these days – tourists. In fact, had every night been like this one, then everyone would have had to shut up shop and leave. I peered in the windows of the pubs and restaurants by the quay – no doubt heaving in the summer – to see waiters sitting dolefully on chairs reading magazines, and barmen listening to solitary drinkers perched on stools, as they passed ever more incoherent opinions on politicians and football managers with each melancholic pint.

  I walked to the end of the pier, where a huge statue was silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Upon closer inspection, it appeared to be a pregnant woman holding a sword aloft, standing on a pile of law books and carrying some scales. You know, as pregnant women do. As I walked around her, I noticed that one half of her belly was open to the elements, so that we could see her unborn baby. I began to worry for her. In spite of two visits to the midwife wi
th Fran, I was still no expert on pregnancy, but I did know that this would be something that would cause Maureen, our bright and breezy midwife, to tut and offer a little shake of the head:

  ‘Now that’s something that we’ll need to take a little look at. Not ideal, tum-tum being open to the elements, but ho-hum.’

  Only the following morning, at the same time as I learned that this was a Damien Hirst sculpture, did I discover why the pregnant lady’s foetus was visible for all to see. Obviously, as Damien himself makes clear, it is an allegory of truth and justice (I was a fool not to see this myself).

  You’ll have to excuse my cynical tone, but I’m afraid that with most art, I’m completely unable to ‘get’ what I’m supposed to ‘get’, and as each artwork is ‘explained’ to me, I become further distanced from it. I simply don’t understand the language of art criticism. Once, walking round the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and listening to the audio commentary on some of the experimental modern art, I wanted to tear off the headphones and stamp on them. All that stopped me was the fact that in so doing I might have created a more impressive piece of art than most of what I was observing, and I didn’t want to upset the museum’s curator.

  Verity, as this sculpture is called, is very striking. There. Let me leave it at that, before I embarrass myself. What is impressive about it is that Mr Hirst, a resident of Ilfracombe and the world’s richest living artist, has magnanimously lent the statue to the town for twenty years. An allegory of precaution and parsimony.

  When I got back to Varley House, I could hear Titch snorting and grunting as I approached the door of Room 6. Clearly my massage had been merely a temporary anaesthetic. I could only guess at quite what the other hotel guests had made of these noises, but I imagined that a few of them would try to avert eye contact with me in the morning.

  Titch was wide awake and patrolling the room confidently, as if she’d always lived here. With great respect to Rod’s carpets, like a good girl, she’d had a poo and wee on the tiled floor of the bathroom.