Love Among the Bookshelves Read online

  He was out of the door and on his way downstairs before the echoes of his last remark had ceased to shake the window. I was left to entertain Mrs Ukridge.

  So far her share in the conversation had been confined to the pleasant smile which was apparently her chief form of expression. Nobody talked very much when Ukridge was present. She sat on the edge of the armchair, looking very small and quiet. I was conscious of feeling a benevolent pity for her. If I had been a girl, I would have preferred to marry a volcano. A little of Ukridge, as his former headmaster had once said in a moody, reflective voice, went a very long way.

  ‘You and Stanley have known each other a long time, haven’t you?’ said the object of my commiseration, breaking the silence.

  ‘Yes. Oh yes. Several years. We were masters at the same school.’

  Mrs Ukridge leaned forward with round, shining eyes.

  ‘Really? Oh, how nice!’ she said ecstatically.

  Not yet, to judge from her expression and the tone of her voice, had she found any disadvantages attached to the arduous position of being Mrs Stanley Ukridge.

  ‘He’s a wonderfully versatile man,’ I said.

  ‘I believe he could do anything.’

  ‘He’d have a jolly good try!’

  ‘Have you ever kept fowls?’ asked Mr Ukridge, with apparent irrelevance.

  I had not. She looked disappointed.

  ‘I was hoping you might have had some experience. Stanley, of course, can turn his hand to anything; but I think experience is rather a good thing, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. But . . .’

  ‘I have bought a shilling book called Fowls and All about Them, and this week’s copy of C.A.C.’

  ‘C.A.C.?’

  ‘Chiefly about Chickens. It’s a paper, you know. But it’s all rather hard to understand. You see, we . . . but here is Stanley. He will explain the whole thing.’

  ‘Well, Garny, old horse,’ said Ukridge, re-entering the room after another energetic passage of the stairs. ‘Years since I saw you. Still buzzing along?’

  ‘Still, so to speak, buzzing,’ I assented.

  ‘I was reading your last book the other day.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said, gratified. ‘How did you like it?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, laddie, I didn’t get beyond the third page, because the scurvy knave at the bookstall said he wasn’t running a free library, and in one way and another there was a certain amount of unpleasantness. Still, it seemed bright and interesting up to page three. But let’s settle down and talk business. I’ve got a scheme for you, Garny old man. Yessir, the idea of a thousand years. Now listen to me for a moment. Let me get a word in edgeways.’

  He sat down on the table, and dragged up a chair as a leg rest. Then he took off his pince-nez, wiped them, readjusted the ginger-beer wire behind his ears, and, having hit a brown patch on the knee of his grey flannel trousers several times, in the apparent hope of removing it, resumed:

  ‘About fowls.’

  The subject was beginning to interest me. It showed a curious tendency to creep into the conversation of the Ukridge family.

  ‘I want you to give me your undivided attention for a moment. I was saying to my wife, as we came here, “Garnet’s the man! Clever devil, Garnet. Full of ideas.” Didn’t I, Millie?’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘Laddie,’ said Ukridge impressively, ‘we are going to keep fowls.’

  He shifted himself farther on to the table and upset the ink pot.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘it’ll soak in. It’s good for the texture. Or am I thinking of tobacco ash on the carpet? Well, never mind. Listen to me! When I said that we were going to keep fowls, I didn’t mean in a small, piffling sort of way—two cocks and a couple of hens and a golf ball for a nest egg. We are going to do it on a large scale. We are going to run a chicken farm!’

  ‘A chicken farm,’ echoed Mrs Ukridge with an affectionate and admiring glance at her husband.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, feeling my responsibilities as chorus. ‘A chicken farm.’

  ‘I’ve thought it all over, laddie, and it’s as clear as mud. No expenses, large profits, quick returns. Chickens, eggs, and the money streaming in faster than you can bank it. Winter and summer underclothing, my bonny boy, lined with crackling Bradbury’s. It’s the idea of a lifetime. Now listen to me for a moment. You get your hen—’

  ‘One hen?’

  ‘Call it one for the sake of argument. It makes my calculations clearer. Very well, then. Harriet the hen—you get her. Do you follow me so far?’

  ‘Yes. You get a hen.’

  ‘I told you Garnet was a dashed bright fellow,’ said Ukridge approvingly to his attentive wife. ‘Notice the way he keeps right after one’s ideas? Like a bloodhound. Well, where was I?’

  ‘You’d just got a hen.’

  ‘Exactly. The hen. Priscilla the pullet. Well, it lays an egg every day of the week. You sell the eggs, six for half a crown. Keep of hen costs nothing. Profit—at least a couple of bob on every dozen eggs. What do you think of that?’

  ‘I think I’d like to overhaul the figures in case of error.’

  ‘Error!’ shouted Ukridge, pounding the table till it groaned. ‘Error? Not a bit of it. Can’t you follow a simple calculation like that? Oh, I forgot to say that you get—and here is the nub of the thing—you get your first hen on tick. Anybody will be glad to let you have a hen on tick. Well, then, you let this hen—this first, original hen, this on-tick hen—you let it set and hatch chickens. Now follow me closely. Suppose you have a dozen hens. Very well, then. When each of the dozen has a dozen chickens, you send the old hens back to the chappies you borrowed them from, with thanks for kind loan; and there you are, starting business with a hundred and forty-four free chickens to your name. And after a bit, when the chickens grow up and begin to lay, all you have to do is to sit back in your chair and endorse the big cheques. Isn’t that so, Millie?’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘We’ve fixed it all up. Do you know Combe Regis, in Dorsetshire? On the borders of Devon. Bathing. Sea air. Splendid scenery. Just the place for a chicken farm. A friend of Millie’s—girl she knew at school—has lent us a topping old house, with large grounds. All we’ve got to do is to get in the fowls. I’ve ordered the first lot. We shall find them waiting for us when we arrive.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m sure I wish you luck. Mind you let me know how you get on.’

  ‘Let you know!’ roared Ukridge. ‘Why, my dear old horse, you’re coming with us.’

  ‘Am I?’ I said blankly.

  ‘Certainly you are. We shall take no refusal. Will we, Millie?’

  ‘No, dear.’

  ‘Of course not. No refusal of any sort. Pack up tonight and meet us at Waterloo tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s awfully good of you . . .’

  ‘Not a bit of it—not a bit of it. This is pure business. I was saying to Millie as we came along that you were the very man for us. A man with your flow of ideas will be invaluable on a chicken farm. Absolutely invaluable. You see,’ proceeded Ukridge, ‘I’m one of those practical fellows. The hard-headed type. I go straight ahead, following my nose. What you want in a business of this sort is a touch of the dreamer to help out the practical mind. We look to you for suggestions, laddie. Flashes of inspiration and all that sort of thing. Of course, you take your share of the profits. That’s understood. Yes, yes, I must insist. Strict business between friends. Now, taking it that, at a conservative estimate, the net profits for the first fiscal year amount to—five thousand . . . No, better be on the safe side—say, four thousand five hundred pounds . . . But we’ll arrange all that end of it when we get down there. Millie will look after that. She’s the secretary of the concern. She’s been writing letters to people asking for hens. So you see it’s a thoroughly organized business. How many h
en-letters did you write last week, old girl?’

  ‘Ten, dear.’

  Ukridge turned triumphantly to me.

  ‘You hear? Ten. Ten letters asking for hens. That’s the way to succeed. Push and enterprise.’

  ‘Six of them haven’t answered, Stanley, dear, and the rest refused.’

  ‘Immaterial,’ said Ukridge with a grand gesture. ‘That doesn’t matter. The point is that the letters were written. It shows we are solid and practical. Well now, can you get your things ready by tomorrow, Garny old horse?’

  Strange how one reaches an epoch-making moment in one’s life without recognizing it. If I had refused that invitation, I would not have—at any rate, I would have missed a remarkable experience. It is not given to everyone to see Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge manage a chicken farm.

  ‘I was thinking of going somewhere where I could get some golf,’ I said undecidedly.

  ‘Combe Regis is just the place for you, then. Perfect hotbed of golf. Full of the finest players. Can’t throw a brick without hitting an amateur champion. Grand links at the top of the hill not half a mile from the farm. Bring your clubs. You’ll be able to play in the afternoons. Get through serious work by lunchtime.’

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I am absolutely inexperienced as regards fowls. I just know enough to help myself to bread sauce when I see one, but no more.’

  ‘Excellent! You’re just the man. You will bring to the work a mind unclouded by theories. You will act solely by the light of your intelligence. And you’ve got lots of that. That novel of yours showed the most extraordinary intelligence—at least as far as that blighter at the bookstall would let me read. I wouldn’t have a professional chicken farmer about the place if he paid to come. If he applied to me, I should simply send him away. Natural intelligence is what we want. Then we can rely on you?’

  ‘Very well,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s very kind of you to ask me.’

  ‘Business, laddie, pure business. Very well, then. We shall catch the eleven-twenty at Waterloo. Don’t miss it. Look out for me on the platform. If I see you first, I’ll shout.’

  2

  Holiday Reading: Classics and Comics

  After I lost my father I continued my schooling in Simla, at Bishop Cotton’s, but for my winter holidays I would come to my mother’s and stepfather’s home in Dehradun.

  ‘Home’ was never in the same place. Problems with the rent and unrelenting landlords were constantly plaguing them, and every time I came down from the hills I would find them in a different house—one of those being a rather dilapidated old bungalow on the Eastern Canal Road.

  Here, I was given a room of my own, a rather gloomy room with a roof that leaked badly; but at least it was my own room, and most of the time I was left to my own devices, my mother and stepfather having given up trying to turn me into a great shikari.

  That year I had come down from school with two or three books given to me as prizes—for literature or history, if I remember rightly. One was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and I decided that—having little else to do—I would read right through the plays, every one of them, as well as the poems and sonnets. This task I accomplished within a month. I can’t say I enjoyed the exercise, the Elizabethan vocabulary and style being something of a deterrent, but two or three of the plays did take my fancy—The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Henry V. I had just seen Laurence Olivier’s film Henry V, and this helped the written word come alive for me. Shakespeare needs to be performed—and performed well—to be appreciated. I even ploughed through the long narrative poem, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, but it failed to excite me; I suspect that it was written by someone else.

  One stormy night, with thunder and lightning at play, and the roof leaking in several places, I found it difficult to sleep. Mugs, pots and pans had been placed around the room to receive the dripping rainwater. Fortunately, we did not have power cuts in those times, so I was able to keep the light on.

  The book that came to hand was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the perfect choice for a night of gusty winds and driving rain. And the story and the writing held me so compellingly that I stayed up to about three or four in the morning in order to finish the book. The intensity of the writing, the passion and conflict inherent in the story and its characters, captured the imagination of its thirteen-year-old reader as no other book (barring David Copperfield) had done till then.

  Last month, some sixty-five years after first reading Wuthering Heights, I turned to it again, to see if it still gave out the same passion and power. And once again, I was up all night, unable to stop reading until the very end. There are not many books that can stand up to a second reading after a gap of many years. Some of Conrad’s stories have stood up to this test. Typhoon and Heart of Darkness still hold me in their thrall. Favourite passages from Dickens can be enjoyed again and again. So can humorous classics such as The Diary of a Nobody or Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) or Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. Or Kipling at his best, or a great biography such as Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson.

  But to return to that leaky little room on Dehra’s Eastern Canal Road.

  We had a radio set, and sometimes I would listen to the BBC’s General Overseas Service, to comedy programmes such as Tommy Handley’s ITMA (It’s That Man Again). In an interview Tommy Handley had said that The Diary of a Nobody was his favourite book. So I went in search of it. I couldn’t find it in Dehra’s two small bookshops. But two years later I located it in a Simla bookshop, in an Everyman edition, and spent all my pocket money in obtaining it. Nor was I disappointed. Whenever I read it, it has me in stitches. However, the humour is very English and not everyone finds it funny. Some years ago I lent my copy to a Polish musician, who couldn’t see the humour in it. We were Poles apart, you might say.

  There was a bookshop in town, long gone. The Ideal Book Depot, run by a portly gentleman who sat in a dark corner at the rear of the shop. He hated getting out of his chair. If you wanted to buy a book or magazine, you had to take it off the shelf and carry it over to him along with your money. And you had to present him with the correct amount, because he disliked having to count and hand over the change; any sort of physical effort was disagreeable. He reminded me of that fine character actor Sydney Greenstreet, a very large person who looked upon the world with some distaste in the sort of villainous roles he was given in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon.

  I could seldom afford a book, but I had enough pocket money for magazines and comics. The Strand Magazine was still being published and sometimes carried stories by H.E. Bates and A.E. Coppard, two very fine short-story writers. H.E. Bates’s long short story, ‘Alexander’, about a boy’s discovery of the countryside, was to make a great impression on me.

  Here I would buy the Picturegoer, a British film magazine which kept me up to date on the latest productions, some of which made it to Dehra’s two English cinema halls, the Odeon and the Orient. These were well patronized up to 1947, as Dehra had a sizeable Anglo-Indian population. Most of them left after Independence. The Orient cinema, now almost a hundred years old, is still showing pictures, sometimes soft porn emanating from clandestine studios in the south. Gone are the innocent days of Madhubala, Kishore Kumar, and Abbott and Costello.

  My love of the cinema was cut short by the nine months of boarding school that found me in Simla every year, for a stretch of eight years. True, we were allowed into town and could go to the pictures during our midterm breaks, and the school had a 16 mm projector, on which selected films were shown to us once a month. But the sound system was poor, and you couldn’t make out what the actors were saying to each other, unless you were good at lip-reading.

  For light entertainment, comics took the place of films. No television, no Internet in those days! But for those who did not care for books (the vast majority), there were comic-book heroes in abundance�
��Captain Marvel, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Batman and many others—all-American superheroes who had invaded India in comic-book form. Personally, I preferred the English comics, which were funny—The Dandy, Beano, Film Fun and Champion (which carried stories)—but I went along with the craze for superheroes.

  As small boys in the prep school, some of us identified ourselves with favourite superheroes. I took on the mantle of Bulletman, whose special gift was that he could fly faster than a bullet. I was no speedster (coming an easy-going last in the marathon), but in free fights I used my head to good advantage, butting my opponent in the stomach when all else failed. So from bullet-head I became Bulletman, the hero of many a free-for-all in some corner of the school playground.

  In truth, I was closer in spirit to Billy Bunter, the Fat Owl of the Remove, whose exploits (in search of food) appeared in a paper called the Magnet; but the Magnet (along with other story comics like the Wizard and The Hotspur) closed down about that time, and we were left with the superheroes.

  Superman and company still rule the skies, but what happened to Bulletman? I don’t see him around any more. The Phantom has survived—even Popeye, in spite of his bad spelling. But poor old Bulletman appears to have bitten the dust.

  Out of prep school and into senior school, I finally left comics behind and graduated to the world of literature.

  H.E. Bates

  Like my other heroes (Dickens, Jerome K. Jerome, Richard Jefferies), H.E. Bates came from a working-class background, and his formal education ended when he left school. But already (since the age of fourteen) he had begun to write the short stories that were to make him famous.