2002 - Wake up (7 page)

And then there was war; war is always good for the food business. Gives us back our home market.

In 1914 Britain started out anticipating a swift and decisive campaign: little was organised in the way of food supplies, even though before the war already 80 per cent of our cereals were imported. Almost half our meat. Most people can’t believe that, but it’s true. By the winter of 1916, with German submarines taking a heavy toll of supply ships, potatoes as well as other basic commodities were limited and expensive—and that year brought, in addition, a disastrous harvest. As a result the government ordered increased acreage, high-yielding varieties and maximum retail prices, and production almost doubled in two years.

It was the same in World War Two—incentive payments to growers to increase their acreage, and fixed retail prices to encourage the public to consume this home-produced food—over the course of which production doubled. The Ministry of Food issued propaganda exhorting people to
Dig for Victory
. Women turned over their absent husbands’ lawns and planted spuds. Local authorities converted parks into fields and roadside verges into long ribbons of allotments.

When I told Lily about Britain’s wartime effort she pointed out that it was probably the digging, as much as the eating of what was dug, that made our nation healthier then than ever before or since.

§

Some mornings when I get to the office before anyone else I head over to the old aircraft hangars. We moved to the World War Two base beyond the common, and converted the hangars into purpose-built stores with forced crossflow ventilation and refrigeration systems, in 1983. I’d persuaded Greg the cold winter before, ‘82, or was it ‘81? Cost us a crippling amount of money, a loan I begged the bank for. Went down on my hands and knees. A crazy expense. One of the best things we ever did.

Our storage units in the old place couldn’t cope that cold winter. The cheap heaters over-compensated, turned the warehouses into saunas, made the spuds perspire like Swedes, as Greg put it. Outside, the world froze, while inside those large units, a thousand tons of Pentland Squire and Maris Piper sweated away. Condensation dropped off the ceiling, down the sides, dripped off everything. Got into the control boxes, blew them off the walls.

So, anyway, what I do is when I get to work early, when there’s no one around, I wander into one of the hangars. Leave the lights off, let my eyes become accustomed to the dark, and you know, I just breathe. Stand surrounded, and dwarfed, by tall columns made up of crates of potatoes. The smell’s so strong it’s like being in the lair of some underground animal. I inhale the dank and lovely smell of potatoes. Of the female, musky earth.

§

Greg is more primitive than me. He’s more straightforward. I remember when our sister was fourteen or fifteen and in the first full bloom of her beauty, Greg, four years older, wanted nothing so much as the chance to protect her, to defend her honour. Melody’s Botticelli beauty called forth such valour from him, from his deepest instincts, although in fact hers was not the sort of beauty that men lusted after. They were more likely to want to fight my brother for the privilege of protecting her! Hers was not that ripe fuckable loveliness of certain nurses, waitresses, secretaries in their make-up, their discardable uniform, sheer hose, rip-me panties, that a man may, if he is fortunate, stumble into in his fumbling way through this life.

No, Melody’s beauty was pure. It inspired in regular men noble desires, chivalric tendencies lying dormant in their genes; it revitalised courtly dreams. Only irredeemable oiks and thugs, evolutionary waste washed up in our town, lusted after our sister with lewd gestures, Neanderthal propositions. These hooligans my brother fought.

§

Greg was impulsive, headstrong. Within years, if not months, of moving to the air base—
Sharpe Brothers
renamed
Spudnik
—we were employing almost a hundred people. Greg was dynamic, and in those early years it was his aggressive energy that animated our workforce.

My brother shouts at people. I never shout at people. How often I’ve had to intervene over the years! To assuage ruffled feathers in the pub, to calm sobbing girls at work, to part punchers. I am slow, ungainly, in my movement; I lurch, frankly, and look fondly down at the world from my unimposing height. But parting punchers at least is something tall men do best. What’s the secret? Blocking eyelines is the secret. If you can stop two fighters eyeballing each other you’ve got a chance of neutralising the psychosis. It’s a good tip.

I find fighting undignified, degrading. It’s more natural for short men, close to the ground. We tall thin men are clumsy, absurd fighters. We lose our balance, become tottering, ineffectual dolts.

§

My brother is drawn to conflict. I am repelled by it. And I’m not one of those people who nurse grudges, while Greg blows up but then it’s over. No, not at all. Me, I forget, while he’d gladly fight the same battle all over every day. I regard myself as tolerant. I accept oddity; flaws. A couple of years ago I was asked by a
Chronicle
journalist, for a full-page profile of a prominent local figure—which Lily tore out of the paper and Blu-tacked to the wall of the downstairs loo—what I would like for my epitaph. A rather morbid question, I thought, but I said, “How about,
He suffered fools gladly
?”

§

It doesn’t take much imagination to see why Greg and I made good business partners. I am cautious, thoughtful. I brood over the company’s prospects, and plan ahead. People know that, both within
Spudnik
and outside. Anyone who wants to discuss the future knows to come to me. Because I manage. I sit down with the figures, and I work out the budgets.

Greg thinks on his feet. Bluff, blarney, bullshit. Which seems to be a necessary talent for managing human beings. For inspiring them. The ideal life for my brother would be one filled with brainstorming sessions: bored by his own company, he requires other people to ask questions he doesn’t ask himself, to activate his brain. And when he’s excited, other people get excited. I’ve seen it.

§

It was me who came up with the maxims for which our company gained a little satirical, useful publicity some years back—GROWTH = NATURE people sometimes remember; FOOD = THOUGHT—that we had printed not only on posters but on notepaper, letterheads, free stickers for our workers. Fridge magnets for our customers to take home and give to their kids. Greg had nothing to do with them.

§

I am remote. I don’t have friends, for example. People like or dislike my brother. They care what he says to them. They’re wary of Greg, but only in the most obvious way. When I think of each employee we’ve sacked over the years, I’ve been the one who dealt the fatal blow. It was principally my decision, and me who said the words:
I’m sorry, we have to let you go
.

One night, two or three years ago, my wife sensed me awake beside her at two in the morning. I’m never insomniac. I sleep soundly, but not this night. No idea why. No reason. Anyway, Lily asked what was wrong, and I thought quickly, and I told her how the next morning I was going to have to tell this chap who’d been with us five years, on the graders, that he was no longer wanted. He had a young family, mortgage, the works, and I was certain he had no idea of what was about to befall him. But I explained to Lily how each time we updated machinery labour costs rose, and I’d considered this fellow’s virtues and his failings and stared at my budgets, and I could not justify his salary.

As I told Lily all this I became quite emotional. I could tell it impressed her. Lily distrusts the rough and tumble of money, and the catch at my throat was something she was gratified to hear.

“I have to do it,” I said. “Once I’ve done it, I’ll be all right. But I don’t like what I have to do.”

Lily gave me a sleepy kiss. “Don’t change,” she said.

§

Greg and I have always talked. We discuss everything, endlessly. I’d be quite happy to make big decisions alone, and I do believe Greg would let me; while I don’t really need to know every detail of each conversation Greg’s had with farmer, wholesaler, greengrocer and so on and on. But we yap and yak, and I think the words are the bricks in our relationship, they help to make us as formidable as we are. People know how different we may be but they also understand we’re an unbreakable pair. Even today, though, Greg gets fed up with administration, and marketing, and I’ll catch sight of him striding across the yard, pulling on a white coat and a hard hat. I know what he’s doing. What he’s doing is he’s going to spend a couple of hours checking machinery and the men and women who operate it. He’s going to make sure that two samples are taken off every load that’s driven in, to be washed and assessed for temperature, mechanical damage and disease; he’ll check that the hot-box, which accelerates their development so they can be tested again, is fine-tuned. He’ll check the decanting of spuds from bulkers to boxes and he’ll scramble over the Acupack, where the potatoes jiggle along riddles that grade them by size. “They look like they’re marching,” my brother’ll tell someone, probably Frank, whose domain it is and has been ever since we installed it, the first in this country; who’ll reply, “Yes, boss, they do.”

Greg’ll watch the women sorting the line and make sure they’re picking out every reject for stock feed; he’ll stare at the bagging machines that swallow punnets with thick clingfilm, and he’ll scrutinise the girls sticking labels on bags for our supermarket customers. And you can be sure that he’ll find mistakes, human and mechanical, wherever he goes.

“That bloody belt’s out of alignment,” Greg’ll shout. “Those should be plastic, not wire, those screens.” Or, “No, that’s not how you do it, Jesus, give it here, I’ll show you.” As long as they don’t argue he’ll hold nothing against anyone, and he’ll come back to the office refreshed, content, spent.

When Greg swears at our employees they don’t, on the whole, mind. He’s yelled and cursed and even struck people. But as a result, when he compliments someone they know it means something. They glow. When my brother smiles with appreciation their faces light up too. They’ll do anything for Greg, our workers, it’s one of the secrets of whatever success we’ve had so far. The farmers we deal with, too. Whatever the state of things, Greg assures me, farmers don’t want traders to share their misery: they want someone to turn up and tell a filthy joke or two, take the mick out of their rustic clothes, share some gossip. He’s right.

§

I used to wonder of other people how they could waste their lives. I was bemused by those without ambition, droning out of school with neither skills nor plans.
How can you waste your life?

Greg and I used to refer to such of our contemporaries as losers, wasters, riffraff. People who had no drive, would never amount to anything, whose entire working lives would depend upon the whim of ruthless bosses, the caprice of market forces. Youngsters like us, they were, with the same fresh sap in them but no, all they possessed was the vague expectation, or demand, that they’d be enveloped in the security of some mundane job, a career even, that would fill the dead hours of the week in which a human being was obliged to work and leave them free, with a little cash in their pocket and spring in their step, to enjoy the weekend. That was all.

When Greg and I began to employ other people, the losers, the wasters, began to work for us. They began to waste their lives doing our bidding, and I realised that this must have been what they were for: their function was to work for us, to help us build our little company.

§

Sometimes you learn true things about people that jolt your idea of them, that startle your framing of the world. Personal things. Secrets. Intimate trivia.

Take Greg. I know his opinions, his values. So many conversations down the years. Offer me any issue, I believe I could predict his response to it as well as I could my own. I know he thinks for example that
in vitro
fertilisation—though it failed Lily and me—is going to revolutionise the way we reproduce. And very soon. That his children, or certainly his grandchildren, will freeze their sperm and eggs early on and, while they then get sterilised and enjoy promiscuous lives, babies will be conceived in the lab.

And in the future, when someone wants to bring up a child, he or she will choose to mate their genes with those, yes, of their partner of the moment, perhaps, but possibly a friend with fine qualities. A good-looking neighbour, maybe. Or they’ll pay for the DNA of some athlete, or actor, whoever they can afford.

“A thousand offspring of Britney Spears roaming the planet,” my brother conjectured.

I’ve not told him everything about me and Lily, but that’s what he thinks. I know that. It is more personal details that surprise. A year ago Greg told me that he hated making love in bed. I wasn’t sure I heard him right.

“A bed’s for sleeping,” he maintained. “I like sex in any other room. In every other room. In the hallway. On the stairs.”

My brother’s marriage was long since over but he’s a serial monogamist: he likes his life shared, in a committed relationship. When it turns, as it always does, he lets it go and gets quickly into the next one.

“What about first thing in the morning?” I asked him, playing for time. “Don’t you ever wake up with your woman, and you both kind of ease sleepily into each other?”

“Maybe,” he conceded.

At the time he was telling me this, Greg’s girlfriend was a hazel-headed, energetic solicitor, with whom he disappeared at weekends to go sailing, often with a boatload of other rustling, laughing people.

“That heavy-lidded half-awake sensuality. She snuggles up to you. Don’t tell me you yell at her,
No! Not here. Not in bed. Come to the kitchen. Let me ravish you upon the formica work surfaces?
”

“OK,” my brother accepted. “You pedantic twat.”

“
I demand the indentation of the draining board in your buttocks!
;”

“Enough already. If I wake up and she’s already cuddled up in the way you’re describing, nuzzling into me, of course. What, am I going to spoil that? I’m telling you what I prefer, John. I prefer it in the bathroom. In the shower. The feel of porcelain.”