With a machete in the Groves of Academe

Same exam board, eight
years later. Note the minatory
bit in bold letters

Back in 1951, after I’d started work, I got my GCE O-levels: English Language (pass), English Literature (pass), Maths (pass), Art (pass), German Oral (pass). As to History, Geography, Divinity, etc, zilch. 

Pretty bad news. Granted I was already earning money but prospects for a secondary career – as a cyberspace intellectual – looked thin. Thank God cyberspace hadn’t been invented then.

The results were worse than they seem. Forget Eng. Lang/Lit, I never regarded them as legitimate subjects. I spoke the lingo and read books so what’s to know? I could have spelled “accommodation” if asked. I wrote a 600-word essay on journalism and finished it before half time. Re-wrote it more legibly.

In the Art exam I was asked to illustrate this: It has just gone dark. A bonfire has been lit in the grounds of a country house. Fireworks are going off.

Cunningly I devised a layout viewed from behind the country house. Thus 75% of the space was occupied by the house’s black silhouette. The action was squeezed into what was left. Motto: don’t work harder, work smarter. Bingo. An O-level.

In German Oral I merely gave the examiner my whole German vocabulary, albeit as a list, not joined up in sentences.

Which leaves Maths. Which I dreaded. One question occupied a full page in the four-page set of questions. It concerned a copper ball to which obscure things happened. Certain aids (The coefficient of expansion of X, the ratio of Y to Z, Avogadro’s Number, though I can’t be sure) were provided. Proof, surely, that the question was so hard that lame-brains like me would need help.

Where to start? Did I finish in time? No one else in my class even attempted it. Perhaps the Gods intervened.

My elevation to  intellectual arrived equally by chance.

Withered

Flower-shop, East Tremont, The Bronx. Rusting vases stacked outside; phone echoes in the near-empty display room.

Fabienne: Yeh….  No good news, Mr Fahid. I’ll be out by five as agreed….  You’ve done your best. ‘preciate that… Yeh, yeh. Floors swept… Least I could do… Hard sell, sure. She laughs. Hard place to sell flowers.

A small spirit stove heats water. She spoons Maxwell House into a cup. Cars roar past. Time shuffles. Doorbell tinkles.

F: Hey, Gramma Damrosch. Coffee? Black’s all I’ve got.

GD: I got milk.

F: Guess you know the bad times. Take my chair. I’ll use these crates.

GD: You cheerful. What’ll you do?

F: Leave this stinking city if I had the dough. Reminds me of my ex. Jersey, by the ocean would be good. But I’m dreaming. A diner’s more likely; the early shift.

GD: I’d buy flowers…

F: No, no. Your husband… Pick a bunch, my gift. You bought when you could.

GM: Roses, once. Pauses. Just once.

Late afternoon, getting dark. Doorbell.

F: Hey, you’re young to be buying flowers.

Grins. Black, too.

F: I didn’t say that. Hey, not much to see. Last day, I’m closing.

He: Shit.

F (Intrigued): Why should it matter?

He: Mom’s birthday but I was short. Got myself a deuce now, and an idea. Flowers. Forget cooking and cleaning. But you’re bust. No other flower shops on Tremont.

F: Five bucks. Make up your own bunch.

He: Better you do it. Telling me what I’ve got

He leaves, swaggering with this new thing, a bunch of flowers.

Potted fuchsias, dahlias shrivelling, mimosa clusters; into the garbage. For herself a lily – almost pristine. Recalling her efficiency and its unmade bed she hands the lily to a bemused cop outside the subway.

Ah, that special "smack"

No American I subsequently met ever asked why I - wedded a mere four years and with a daughter of two - up-sticked from London and started work in Pittsburgh. It wasn’t an abrupt decision. The planning and its execution took a full year and I had to persuade the US Embassy I didn’t intend to overthrow the Johnson administration.

If anyone pondered they probably imagined we’d been gently starving to death under a socialist tyranny. Our neighbours were vague about “overseas”

In fact my reasons were complex and once we’d turned on the heating in 3214 Annapolis Avenue I quickly forgot them. Which is not to say I wasn’t happily reminded.

The guy I finally worked for – a physicist who fancied launching a magazine – played right-field with the Jugoslavs softball team. Just a name, I assure you. Although I’d bought a glove and fielded grounders with the local kids, I had no higher pretensions. On Tuesday evenings I watched the Jugoslavs play. After which, beer and a KFC tub at the Jugoslav club.

I’d become an obsessive about baseball. Softball is baseball watered down. What surprised me was the sporting competence of these guys, some “getting on a bit”. Confidently taking high hits in the outfield, humming the fat ball into the plate.

There’s a special “smack” when a hard-hit ball ends in a fielder’s glove. I can hear it now and I’m transported to that scruffy field, sitting on a bench, wondering whether Ken, my boss, is going to hit safely. Nothing evokes the nature of the USA more precisely; the competitiveness; the good-natured shouting; the prospect of beer. It wasn’t a prior reason for disrupting my London life but it became one. Retrospectively.

Bat and ball in Elysian Fields.

On the Eastern Seaboard: part two

New readers. Read Part One first. Not that I’m guaranteeing anything, you understand. 

RR: Barman!

Barman (He’d been listening): Remind me.

RR: Martini straight up, Tanqueray, three ice cubes in the shaker, with a twist.

The barman nods towards Oxblood staring out at Central Park.

RR: Better ask him. He’s not with me

Barman: Sir! Buddy!

Oxblood turns slowly, as if suddenly finding himself in the Gents. 

Oxblood: Er… Brandy Alexander.

The barman looks at me and I look back at him. Both heavily silent.

Oxblood: I been thinking. Just can’t find the right words.

RR: Not good in your line of business.

Oxblood (Briefly terrified): Wha..a..!

RR: Media, surely. Slip-ons with no socks.

Oxblood: Shee-eet.

The Brandy Alexander is served. The barman and I watch on. Oxblood sips, realises we’re spectating, and gulps off the whole drink. The cream leaves him with a white moustache. He seems strengthened.

Oxblood: Got a sort of intimate question.

RR: Shoot.

Oxblood: You have any success…?

RR: Success?

Oxblood: Y’know. With women?

RR: Not in the UK, it’s why I left. American women have shown some slight interest. College types.

The strength drained out of his face. He stared down at his sockless feet.

Oxblood: You’re shitting me. Foreign shit.

RR: Why would I do that?

Oxblood: Acting superior. Being a Brit.

RR: Bet you earn three times as much.

As if I’d handed him a crutch.

Oxblood: Yeah! Sure! Four times at least! (Looks me up and down.) This shirt’s Armani, fr’instance.

RR: Something to talk about.

For the first time he realised what a bastard I was.

Oxblood: So what do you talk about?

RR: You guessed it. Hygiene. I slay ‘em.

A long pause while the sun went down.

Oxblood: Never done a martini. Should I try one?

On the Eastern Seaboard, part one

 

There’s $100 in my wallet and I’m into my third (out of six) martinis at the near-empty Plaza Hotel’s Oak Bar, NYC. A man, one-third my age, wearing oxblood slip-ons without socks, looks my way for fifteen seconds, sits next to me at the bar.

Oxblood: Brit, eh?

I nod.

Oxblood: I can always tell.

I say nothing. He waits. Says: Sheesh.

I say nothing.

Oxblood (Rising impatience): C’mon. Don’t you wanna know why?

RR: I can guess.

Oxblood (Waits): Well, guess then.

I shake my head.

Oxblood: Guy, you could be wrong.

RR: I dare say.

Oxblood: You wanna get up my nose? That’s it. Up my nose.

RR: It’s kind of on offer. Your nose, I mean. But no, I’d rather not.

Oxblood (Mumbling): Trying to be friendly.

RR: No, you’re not. This is Noo York City. You’re putting me down. Trying to. (Deep sigh) For what it’s worth, it’s the chinos.

Oxblood (Astonished): You knew!

RR: As I said, it’s The Big Apple. Predictable as winter after fall. The answer’s going to shock you, but… hey! The answer’s: every six months, sometimes longer.

Oxblood (Mouth, half-open, stays that way. The pure village idiot except this is the self-described City of Sophistication. Gulps in air, starts to stammer): I can’t… I just can’t… Look, let me get this straight. How can you…? No, first things. Is that a martini? Lemme…

RR: I buy my own drinks.

Oxblood (Struggling to smile): Kinda rude, eh? I thought you Brits were supposed to be polite.

RR: Best I pay my own way…

Oxblood: The Plaza’s not cheap.

RR: I know that. You buy me a drink, we talk, soon we argue. You get angry, call me a panhandler because you bought me the drink. New York’s so predictable.

(More follows)

The land of unsleep

Nights are spent in twitching wakefulness – sleep far away. Peaceful thoughts would be welcome but instead there’s a perpetual oscillation – rolling left and right in bed, inexplicably. For beauty? For understanding? To hide what I’ve become?

VR is elsewhere and I hate that. I rise, sit on the bedside, embattled by the dark. Go downstairs, swig from a one-litre bottle of San Pellegrino, the chill and fizz cutting my throat like a knife. Impressions flit by; might they be trapped? There’s a ring-back exercise book (It opens up flat.) available. The trick being to write in pencil; when one's lying in bed a ball-point’s ink must flow upwards.

Warmed by the duvet here’s temporary quiet. Bedside light on, scribbling, worrying whether I'll be be legible. Never mind, I’m no longer thrashing like a landed trout. And I may travel.

Fifty years ago, in Dormont a Pittsburgh suburb, Mrs G, widow, nurse at the hospital, sole earner for two daughters and her resident mother, proved to be an unexpected neighbour. Fortyish and cheerful she fits none of the US stereotypes  I envisaged when I crossed the Atlantic.

Innocent yet self-sufficient she never appears in US movies or in US novels. A quintessential suburbanite, but strong with it. She welcomed our four-year-old daughter. A fleeting character on my life’s video. A comforting remembrance.

It’s 3 am. Done with writing, I turn off the light and become cocooned. Sleep? Perhaps.

4 am. More San Pellegrino. Thereafter? Presumably sleep.

 

Sounds that persist

Words, phrases and sentences of oral significance and remembrance.

Secondary-school essay; age 11. English master is hampered by my illegible handwriting and asks me to read the essay aloud. I read “I was intrigued….” I’d understood the meaning but, never having heard it spoken, pronounced it “intri-gewed”. He corrects me kindly.

Invited to go with my grannie and uncle to the movies - then known as “the films”; aged 12? “Yes, as long I won’t be de trop.” (too many).

Spoken to the point where it became an addiction; middle to old age. Rebarbative.

A qualifier which I denied both my daughters; parenthood. Really. As in: Daughter: It was really good. Me: Not really, really, good, then?

Whenever the opportunity arises, often concerning trumpets; lifelong. Plangent.

During adolescence, in the presence of young women, on the tip of my tongue but never uttered; teens to early twenties. Lovely.

In response to residents of south-eastern England who imagined they could do a Yorkshire accent; from 22 onwards. Gradely.

In the hearing of well-educated Americans; 1965 – 1972. Deliquescent. Plus a whole slew of polysyllabic words where the letter l is prominent. Eg, polysyllabic.

In the hearing of people of any nationality lacking any knowledge of mechanical engineering; lifelong. Epicyclic.

To the French, spoken in French; 1972 onwards. I cannot speak in French but I can communicate in French.

To the Germans; latterly. Schade (It’s a pity).

When drunk; 18 onwards. I’m not drunk… am I?

On entering a garden centre; post-retirement. I’m not sure I know the word... or the tool.

To the GP; post-retirement; I wish! It’s like everything I’ve suffered from since birth, all rolled into one; but at a much lower level of sensitivity typical of my age group.