He turned.
‘Did you go to Eton?’
‘No, sir, I didn’t.’
I didn’t, as it happens. And I didn’t think he would have been too familiar with the various comprehensive establishments of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, where I did go to school, so I didn’t elucidate further.
‘Do take a seat. You can move those books onto the table there.’
I did.
‘Now, can I get you a drink? A glass of sherry, perhaps?’
‘Yes, sir, a sherry would be perfect.’
He left the room, and came back into it holding a heavy brown bottle and a glass—a single, large glass—and he placed them on the small table between us, and sat down in his chair. He still had on his jacket, brown herringbone tweed with worn leather buttons, although it was warm indoors; he reached into his breastpocket and pulled out a blue-and-white spotted handkerchief, with which he wiped the dust from the sherry bottle before uncorking it. Then with a steady hand—surprisingly steady, given his age—he poured out the sherry, and kept on pouring, until the glass was more or less full to the brim. It was, as I say, a large glass, and it held about half a pint, or thereabouts, and he slid it across the table towards me.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re very kind.’
He nodded.
‘I hope you don’t mind if I don’t join you,’ he said. ‘You see, I can’t bear the stuff.’
Nor could he ever.
Once, out hunting in the English countryside as a young man, he was handed a flask, from which he had his first taste of beer.
‘It was revolting,’ he said, ‘I spat it into a hedge.’
And that, pretty much, was that, as far as his relationship with drink went.
I remember little of the detail now of what followed, except for disjointed snatches of conversation and images of long ago and far away. A young man’s journey into a forbidden kingdom, on a quest to find the unknown destination of a distant river. A midnight meeting in a forest clearing with a savage potentate and his armed warriors, and the glint of curved daggers in the moon’s pale light. The burning heat of desert sands. Wave upon wave of armed and bloodied hosts screaming out their victorious deeds before an emperor’s throne. A great feast celebrating the killing of four unknown men—shot in the back and from a distance, for all anyone knew—and the young killer all shy and manful, he said, as praise was heaped upon him, like an athlete at Oxford being awarded his Blue for cricket.
Oh, and Salman Rushdie, and what an infernal bloody nuisance the man was, and the sooner the Iranians finished him off, the better it would be for all concerned.
I came out onto the street an hour later, leaving behind an empty glass, and with an invitation to call again. Whatever I had said, it must, I think, have found favour. This time the invitation was not to Tite Street but to his other home, where he spent the majority of his year. This home, the other home, was a mud hut, and it was in Africa.
From Tite Street I followed the crowds on the King’s Road, past the plate-glass shop-fronts, past the restaurants, past the antique dealers, the interior designers, the clothes designers, the cavalry barracks and the crocodiles of uniformed schoolchildren in their corduroy knickerbockers, and thence to Sloane Square underground station, where, down on the platform, a river flows above your head. I say a river, but it’s more of a stream, a brook or burn that flows in from the west, and which is called the Westbourne. You can’t actually see the water in it, or touch it, but you can hear it as it crosses above you, suspended, as it is, from the girders in a big old riveted cast-iron pipe, on its way out under the concrete and tarmac of the streets, on beneath the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital and then out from a Victorian outlet-pipe known as the Ranelagh Sewer into the Thames, the great brown river whose ancient name, like that of the Tame, the Teme and the Tamar, meaning, perhaps, ‘the dark one’, goes back far beyond recorded history.
But as for the Westbourne, there was a time, once, when it was a real stream, a stream with grassy banks and trees leaning over it, and when it crossed open land—fields and forests—as it flowed from its springs in the Bagshot sand in Hampstead down to the big river. The Saxons called it the Cy Bourne, or King’s Burn: over the years that became ‘Kilburn’; in other times it became the Serpentine, which it still is, briefly, in the short space where it comes to the surface as an ornamental lake in Regent’s Park. Mostly, though, it has been lost and forgotten, along with all the other lost and forgotten rivers with which London once teemed—the Tyburn, the Fleet, the Walbrook, the Effra, the Wandle, the Peck, the Ravensbourne … It lives on today only in the street-names and place-names of the areas through which it once passed.
Does drinking too much sherry when you’re unaccustomed to it make you think about things like this? ‘Maudlin’ is the word that comes to mind here, as I write these words: yes, maudlin—that’s it. I can’t say that I’m a great expert in these matters, but I thought, the world moves on and by and large we’re all the better for it. And yet …
I didn’t know what, precisely, but ‘and yet something’ was definitely a part of it, if you get my drift. There was a definite ‘and yet’ in there—still is, in fact.
Where I come from we have cars and things, and shopping, and we have computers and televisions and bars of chocolate—we have all sorts. No one starves here—which is good. And that was not always the case.
But sometimes you catch a glimpse of what things were once like, and you have intimations of what went before, and of the other lives and times of the ground beneath your feet. And it makes you think, and it makes you wonder what the cost has been, what the price paid, in getting to where we now are.
The economist Milton Friedman once said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. With civilisation, with the way we live now, with all of the things we have, what we have is not so much a lunch—free or otherwise—as a massive multi-course banquet of extraordinary proportions, a spread wholly unimaginable to previous generations.
Imagine what your great-grandfather would have thought, to be here now; imagine what he might have said, to see what you have and where you live, and what you do. Or imagine your great-great-grandfather, more to the point, or all the generations before, all the way back to the woad-painted wattle-and-daub-hut-dwellers we came from. Imagine if they could be lifted out of their time, just for the day, and set down in the middle of your life now.
There is a story that back in the 1940s the Soviet Union bought the film of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to use as propaganda, to show how bad things were in the ‘free world’. Steinbeck’s story is, as stories go, a pretty miserable one, with the Joad family, including the daughter burdened with the ridiculous name of Rose of Sharon, like many others in that place at that time, losing everything when the rains fail and the rivers run dry and their lands turn to dust, and being forced to load up onto their battered old car what few worldly possessions they have and set off to try—spectacularly unsuccessfully—to find a better life elsewhere. Everywhere they turn they are shunned and insulted, and doors are slammed in their faces. And people die. It doesn’t get much worse than that, you might think. But when Soviet audiences saw the film, they didn’t see the same things that you or I might see, and they came out shaking their heads in wonder. They came out shaking their heads in wonder not so much at how bad things were in the USA, but at the fact that over there even the poor, even the lowest of the low, even peasants driven from their farms, that these people had their own motor-cars. Their own. The film was subsequently banned.
That’s what civilisation is like, these days. Even the poor people have motor-cars, now, and computer-game consoles,