An Audience with an Elephant Read online

  To Bryn Rogers (1909—1968), who read none of these

  Kyrchwm Loygyr, a cheisswn greft y caffom yn ymborth

  From Manawyddan, son of Llyr, The Mabinogion, twelfth century

  Let us go to England to learn a craft, that we may make a living

  Contents

  Foreword

  Speak to the Animals

  The Tortoise and the Great War

  An Audience with an Elephant

  Wales

  It Came as a Big Surprise

  The Lost Children

  The Last Tramp

  The Lost Lands

  Roman Twilight

  R.S. Thomas

  Moments

  Who Wrote This Stuff?

  Nude

  When a Young Man’s Dreams Expire

  Singles Weekend

  The Middle of England

  Mixed Emotions

  A Man Who Fell to Earth

  The Riddle of Brixworth

  Last of England’s Village Voices

  England and a Wake

  Norman St John Stevas Chooses a Title

  Listening for England

  Heroes

  Race Against Time

  Mr Sparry Entertains

  The Examinee

  Glutton for Punishment

  The Cricketer

  Relics of Wars Past

  The Big Bang

  Bunker

  The Bomb Factory

  Airbase

  Fantasies

  Up the Workers! (If We Can Find Any. . .)

  The Duchess

  The Butler of Britain

  Ghost Train to Stalybridge

  Dead Writers Society

  Secret Garden, Private Grief

  The Last of Things

  The Gallows Humorist

  End of an Era

  A Ghost in the Church

  Author biography

  Copyright

  Foreword

  EADING THESE PIECES AGAIN, I am amazed I have managed to make a living from journalism. The concerns of English papers and magazines, London news, politics and the already famous, were never mine, which will explain why only two of these pieces were suggested by editors. The rest I had to persuade them to use.

  Sometimes I overdid the persuasion, as when, thinking myself no end of a wag, I got the features editor of the Sunday Telegraph to commission a profile of an elephant on the grounds that the animal was the most successful teenager in show business; the joke stopped when I found myself having to write 2000 words about a creature which did nothing except react to food. But the persuasion I loved. It allowed me to live on my wits, and to draw on the chicanery my ancestors practised at horse-sales. Once, banned from driving, I got the features editor of the Guardian to commission a series on towns, and it was only when the articles were appearing that he realised the towns were within a few miles of each other. I had been hitch-hiking between them. But then, as the editor of Saga Magazine spotted, just about all the travels I have ever undertaken have been in that narrow corridor of land between Northampton, where I live, and Carmarthen, where I was brought up. And why not? All human life is there.

  In the Chronicle of the Princes, a medieval Welsh history, this entry occurs, and it is one of the most wonderful sentences ever written. ‘In the year 1180 there was nothing that might be placed on record.’ Never such confidence again, this was probably the last time anyone had the nerve to admit there had been no news. For what is news? It is a product like any other that now must be gathered daily, for the cameras and the papers are waiting and the ploughman with his Sony Walkman needs briefing every hour on the world’s woes. Yes, but what is it? Ah, answering that question, to quote Larkin out of context, brings the priest and the doctor running over the fields in their long coats. News is what it was in 1180: it is the fortunes of the famous, or at least those they would like known, and the misfortunes of the rest, who have no choice in the matter.

  But it has been my misfortune to live in a time when these distinctions became absolute. On the one side, forever in shadow, is the overwhelming majority of people, of interest only for their purchasing power. On the other is that tiny group on whom the spotlight rests. Television has done this, the fortunes of Hello magazine have been based on it, and the papers have followed, creating between them the cult of celebrity. The result is that at no time in human history have so many become mere spectators, and been so conscious of the fact.

  Celebrities have existed for so long as there has been any form of organised society, but there were far fewer of them: the general, the prince, the politician, the preacher, the murderer, the hangman. And they were part of a remote world. You heard about them, you saw them deified in Staffordshire pottery, you read about them in newspapers which arrived two days late. So you had a different attitude, which occasionally they shared. When William IV became King of England he did not see why he should not go on strolling along St James’s. ‘When I have walked about a few times they will get used to it, and will take no notice.’ These are stories of Cromwell in his days of glory, walking alone at night to gatecrash parties when he heard music, and nobody thought this in the least odd.

  But now the man who appears on television is different from the rest of us. It does not matter any more what he does, he can just read the news aloud or predict the weather; what matters is that he appears nightly in a million sitting rooms. He can double his income by opening supermarkets, fame being the modern equivalent of the King’s touch: by touching that supermarket door he has relieved it of its obscurity.

  The writer Brian Darwent, having written the first biography of the novelist Jack Trevor Story, author of The Trouble with Harry, which Hitchcock filmed, had his manuscript returned by a publisher with this note: ‘The problem in our opinion is that Jack Trevor Story is sadly not enough of a household name, and there are not enough famous people involved in the book to make it of sufficient interest to the general reader.’ They liked the book, parts of which were hilarious, but that was no longer enough for ‘the general reader’, whoever he or she might be. The actual writing had nothing to do with it, as Jeffrey Archer, deciding to turn novelist, once told a friend who had protested that Archer couldn’t write. He would, said that great man, produce a bestseller. And he did. When you are a celebrity there is little you can’t do. When you are not, there is little that you can.

  The serf out in the long fields of the Middle Ages, he had his place, as the poets of his time recognised. The man slumped in front of EastEnders has no place. If he opens a tabloid he will see its plot-lines reported as though these are real events, and he comes to believe they are of more importance than anything in his own life: in the process a man dwindles. ‘When I get to Heaven, they will ask me what I did,’ a lorry driver once said to me. ‘And I shall say, “I was a consumer.”’ But for others there is the terrible underside of the celebrity cult, resulting in the stalker and the loon with the sniper’s rifle, both intent on smashing their way into the goldfish bowl of fame.

  When I started writing magazines and newspapers it was still, just, possible to write about people known only to their relatives and friends, even though nobody else seemed to. As Susannah Hickling, deputy editor of Readers Digest said, ‘You always had this odd idea that ordinary people could be interesting.’ In the following pages you will not meet anyone with a press agent or a publicist, or with a film or pop tour to promote. Only two of these people, the poet R.S. Thomas and the Duchess of Argyll, will be already known to you. The rest are tramps and villagers and squires: you will eat scones with a hangman in retirement, meet a pensioner whose one hobby is to sit A levels, and another who one evening, fishing for salmon, caught something the size of a b
asking shark; for some of them did do extraordinary things. Others, like the man who daily entertains his friends to tea, just went on being themselves; one fell off a church; one attended a television studio debate, but did not speak. Tush, man, as old Falstaff and many features editors have said, mortal men, mortal men. Yet for me, in the process most entered heroic myth.

  If anything has underwritten this collection, it has been those lines by W.H. Auden,

  Private faces in public places

  Are wiser and nicer

  Than public faces in private places.

  It has been a bizarre career. I doubt if anyone else would want to follow it, or could, any more.

  BYRON ROGERS, 2001

  Speak to the Animals

  The Tortoise and the Great War

  HE PASHA WAS in his seraglio; he was eating a lettuce. From time to time the Pasha interrupted his lunch to lurch irritably over to his three dozing concubines, all of whom continued to sleep. He is thought to be 100 years old this year though no one, least of all the Pasha himself, can be sure.

  In the past month he has been visited by BBC Radio Wales, reporters from the local and national press, Radio Orwell, UPI International Broadcasting and a photographer from a German colour magazine. The Pasha must be used to such attention by now, for with every spring, newspapermen come to a house outside Lowestoft to pick him up and scratch his head and take photographs. They come to see Ali Pasha, the only Turkish prisoner of war still in British hands. The Pasha is a tortoise.

  On 6 May 1915 Henry Friston, a 21-year-old seaman, rejoined his battleship, HMS Implacable, after ten days in Hell. Hell was just 200 yards long by 8 yards wide, and on British Naval maps was known as X Beach in the Dardanelles, being too small even to have a name. But in May 1915, men died there in their hundreds, and the din — of British Naval bombardment and Turkish machine-guns — did not stop by day or night. Henry Friston, ferrying the wounded, had been under fire for ten days, had not eaten in three and not slept for two nights. But at this point military history stops and common sense falters, for Henry Friston was one of the world’s great hoarders. Somehow, in the midst of all the bombardments on a crowded beach he picked up a tortoise, and, when he left Gallipoli, the tortoise went too, in his haversack.

  ‘Before us lies an adventure unprecedented in modern war,’ the commanding general, Sir Ian Hamilton, had declared in a force order a fortnight before. And for Ali Pasha, a Turkish tortoise, fully-grown at about at around 30 years old, the unprecedented adventure was just beginning.

  He lived for a year in the gun-pit of a battleship on active service, sliding all over the place in rough weather, as Henry Friston recalled later. But how he managed to remain undetected is a complete mystery. The routine on board a battleship was strict, especially a battleship at war, and as Henry’s son Don reflected, ‘Tortoises make messes’. Then it was over, and Henry brought him home to Lowestoft; Ali Pasha was about to become a household god. ‘He was always there,’ said Don Friston, who works for a Lowestoft design group. ‘He had been there 20 years before I was born.’

  When Henry married in 1921 the tortoise passed to his mother; when she died in 1951 it came back to Henry again; after his death in 1977 it passed to Don. He has pictures of the tortoise with the generations, Henry ageing visibly in each one but Ali Pasha remaining exactly the same. Don Friston is now 47 and expects the tortoise to outlive him and become the pet of his grandchildren, as yet unborn. Some remote generation might just have the shell, he said, but as long as there were Fristons in Lowestoft there would also be an Ali Pasha.

  This is not a story about pets, though the Pasha’s fame has spread and for the last 20 years he has been the only non-canine honorary life member of the Tail-Waggers’ Club of Australia, 70,000 strong. Nor is it about military history. It is about one man’s ability, in the midst of the most extraordinary circumstances he would ever encounter, to go on being himself. In Gallipoli Henry Friston found a tortoise.

  ‘Dad never threw anything away,’ said Don Friston. He kept everything. When he left school in 1908 to become a gardener (the Fristons were fishermen or gardeners) he kept the certificate of attendance presented to him by his headmaster. When he signed on for the Royal Navy in 1912 he kept the oiled parchment (‘Denomination: Free Methodist; Can Swim: Yes’). Even in the war he kept the bizarre little humorous monthly which the Implacable’s crew produced throughout its duration, which, more than any other thing, showed the overwhelming military superiority of the Royal Navy. One item, a spoof of a romantic novel, began: ‘The gown showed off her exquisite figure to advantage. Her lovely face was lit up by a rosy blush and a radiance that is only obtainable by constant use of the very cheapest rouge. . .’.

  Henry Friston kept maps and generals’ memoirs and Turkish bullets and shrapnel and a Turkish army spoon. Ali Pasha never stood a chance. ‘It must have been as common as us seeing rabbits,’ said Don Friston, ‘the only difference being that tortoises are easier to catch.’

  His father, he said, was an odd sort of bloke. He had been very quiet, fond of gardening and fishing — fond of quiet, really. After he came back from the war he announced his intention of never going on his travels again and there were no family holidays; the only time Henry Friston left Lowestoft was to go to Llandudno for a week’s Home Guard training. The only house he ever owned was a railway carriage.

  ‘He’d bought this plot of land, intending to build on it, and he had this old railway carriage which he converted.’ Don Friston unrolled a sheet of paper; his father had even kept his plans. ‘But then the 1930s’ slump came and then the war, and when that was over he was refused planning permission because they’d decided to extend the roads.’

  Yet this very private man was, in his later years, hardly out of the local paper. There was a photograph of him when he retired as a bus inspector in 1959, and the headline explained it all: OWNER OF ALI PASHA RETIRES FROM THE BUSES. ‘It began in the 1950s, I think. Dad has driven a certain route all his life and he’d got to know the reporters, and they’d found out about the tortoise. As far as they were concerned, whenever Ali came out of hibernation, it was the perfect spring story: “It’s here, Ali Pasha is awake.’”

  A wider fame came in 1968 when the News of the World invited readers to write about unusual war souvenirs. Men had kept bayonets and old packs of cigarettes, but from Lowestoft came a letter from a man saying he had taken a tortoise prisoner.

  The Australian papers picked it up because of the Anzac associations with Gallipoli. It did not take long for the Tail-Wagger-in-chief to write from Melbourne, enclosing a badge and certificate of honorary life membership, and marvelling ‘that a soldier amidst all the horror of war thought to care for a creature as unlikely as a tortoise’. Letters poured in from all round the world. ‘Dad used to spend a lot of time with the tortoise. He used to talk to it and tell it what a good old boy it was. After mother died he would spend hours picking dandelions and bindweed for it to eat. Ali Pasha has always been very fond of dandelions.

  ‘Every winter he’d put it away ever so carefully, placing layers of sand in a box with hay on top so it could bury itself, and then insulating this with old newspapers and sacking. Then, of course, it would wake up and all the fuss would start again. My father used to find it very funny. As far as he was concerned, all that had happened was that once on a beach he picked up something he liked and brought it home. And there he was, getting older, and the tortoise getting more and more famous.’

  From a pile of newspaper cuttings, Don Friston unearthed his father’s obituary. The tortoise, he said wryly, had even managed to get into that.

  An Audience with An Elephant

  T IS A WINTER afternoon, and two men are walking slowly across Woolwich Common. They are not alone, and the two are clearly in some awe of the shape that walks between them. This is a Christmas story.

  She is the most successful showbiz figure of her generation, and the most controversial. Opposition to her career led three ye
ars ago to her enforced retirement, but now, like General MacArthur, she has returned. Within the past month she has opened the Christmas season at Harrods, appeared in the Royal Variety Performance at the Palladium, and last Wednesday, on a wall in the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, put, between the handprints of Sir John Gielgud and Dame Peggy Ashcroft, her own unmistakable mark. She is sixteen years old. And all this to her has been mere interruptions in the long days during which she must cram 300lbs of food into herself, for she is 8ft 6ins in height and weighs 2½ tons. She is Rani, the last elephant in Gerry Cottle’s circus.

  Requests for photographs come by the sack-load, yet there are still places in Britain where she cannot go, for the country she ambles through in her 40-week working year is as politically fragmented as mediaeval Germany. The further Left a council, the more strident is its opposition to performing animals, so when a change of regime occurs Rani returns to the recreation grounds and the commons. The most dramatic single index to local government change, she will be in Battersea Park this Christmas, for the Greater London Council has gone and Wandsworth now rules over the coloured lights. But to further confuse her sense of political geography, she has been there before, hired out to the GLC in the days of its pomp, so that Mr Ken Livingstone could pass like Haroun al-Raschid through Battersea.

  For she is not just a circus performer: she is the first and only elephant to be licensed to appear in public under the ‘Dangerous Wild Animals Act’. For £1,000, her daily rate, you can invite her to your wedding, once the appropriate environmental health officer has been contacted and has given his permission after sturdily invoking the Deity a few times. She has appeared at supermarkets, Indian restaurants, once wriggled her way into a village hall, was most recently in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and will be familiar to millions from her endorsement of videos, rice, Turkish delight and cornflakes in TV advertisements. She has, it is claimed, opened more things than the cast of EastEnders.