An Audience with an Elephant (18 page)

It has brought an old-age pensioner much pain and even more expense; he had his hotel bill paid on only one occasion, he said, at Hull. But, when asked directly, all Mr Barnes does is talk about mountains being there. For a fortnight I had been asking the question in different ways and the answers had all been similar. Except once.

‘These things happen,’ said Mr Barnes.

Mr Sparry Entertains

R SPARRY INTRODUCED
his friends as though they were the heroes of the ancient world. ‘This gentleman is well-informed on things like going up chimney stacks,’ said Mr Sparry, and you half expected to hear trumpets. A large man looked up without curiosity from his place by the fire. ‘And Paul here’ — a man in a muffle nodded — ‘Paul is just generally intelligent.’ The man in the muffler did not argue, for in the world of Mr Sparry, just as in fairy tales, each friend has his appointed role. ‘And should you be lucky. . .’. Mr Sparry paused, and one long white hand moved in the air, ‘you could, you just could, meet a man who bumped into King George VI.’

Most afternoons Mr Sparry’s friends crowd into his tiny kitchen to wait for the kettle to boil on the sort of black-leaded range you usually find only in museums. They like tea and they like Mr Sparry who is as strange and amiable a man as ever sidled out of the brain of Mr Charles Dickens. That last sentence shows the effect of Mr Sparry.

He is 50 years old, small and very thin with long pale features. He walks and talks with a sort of silky stateliness so that the world you know is suddenly a long way off. Mr Sparry’s courtesy and his English are both out of another time (‘My father was a natural singer of harmony, which I much envy’); but then he has chosen to live in another time. By trade he is a second-hand bookseller. There are books piled everywhere on the tables and shelves of what was once the front room of a Victorian terraced house in this Black Country village. A wave redevelopment tore through the terrace, bringing new brick shops, but leaving this one house. It left Mr Sparry, too.

He inherited the house from his parents, who had inherited it from his grandparents, who, having bought the house in 1910, built the lean-to kitchen. He has kept everything as it was in their times. ‘We were going to have a bathroom built in the 1950s,’ marvelled Mr Sparry, ‘but we never got round to it. Lack of money was the reason then. Now it is simply a lack of interest.’

He lives alone and coal fires are his only source of heat. He has an electric kettle which his friends insist he uses when they call late at night, but there is no electric boiler or cooker, and the lavatory is outside. The result is that the friends who crowd into this kitchen, most of them men around his own age, find themselves crowding mysteriously into their own childhoods. But it also means that Mr Sparry lives in conditions that would have any landlord pilloried in the popular press.

‘It’s a terrible way to live,’ said the Well-informed Man on the Inside of Chimney Stacks. The street door had opened and Mr Sparry had wandered off to investigate that curiosity, a customer who had come into his shop. ‘I put that coal boiler in for him, found him a wooden cover with the old copper nails in as well; and the wash-basin, got him that. Also the boards for his ceiling. The wind used to blow through his slates before that and you could see the sky. I also got his lavatory to work.’

‘Mr Hale,’ said Mr Sparry, gliding into the room as though on castors, ‘has done that by twisting the old pipes into a modern cistern.’ The result is a wild art décor design. ‘Did that one afternoon when I was having a cup of tea here,’ said the designer. Mr Hale, said Mr Sparry, was the Man Who Had Twisted The Pipes.

Mr Hale had earlier talked about his friend. ‘How does he live?’ Mr Hale took a long swig of tea. ‘On potatoes and vegetables. Doesn’t smoke or drink or mess wi’ women. Eats one raw onion a day, and you should see him do that.’ He pointed to a small hatch in the wall. ‘His cat used to come through that until it died last year. Been with him eighteen years.’ The cat’s basket still hangs on the wall, for nothing gets thrown away here.

Two things underwrite John Sparry’s lifestyle. The first is the economics of the second-hand book trade. Each year he sets out to earn just £2,400, enough to keep him alive and out of sight; any more and Mr Sparry would have to pay income tax. ‘I started doing radio talks about two years ago and that could have wrecked my scheme, but the danger passed. I shall eventually have to make more money but I am placid about it.’ For the moment he has the privacy which only billionaires and the last tramps enjoy. The second thing is his interest in the past. One of his two upstairs rooms is given over to mementoes that he has rescued before the gale of the world could blow them away. He has labelled these neatly in red capitals. MR DUMPHY’S OLD HOLLY LOG. MRS HUDSON’S OLD HAT.

‘Mrs Hudson was a very interesting old lady,’ said Mr Sparry. ‘She had a large goitre on her neck, the result of drinking well water. So I kept her hat.’ CYRIL HILL’S RED HANDKERCHIEF. Hill was the local road-sweeper, when he died Mr Sparry kept his handkerchief. ‘So much gets thrown away,’ he said, ‘and this is our history.’ The effect is startling. For a moment you find yourself staring at a folded red handkerchief as though it were something that had belonged to Achilles.

For, just as the larger world of bureaucrats has no place in Mr Sparry’s own life, so that of conventional historians has no place here. These are not mementoes of public men, for this is the private world of Mr Sparry of which once anything is a part, it casts a giant shadow: the friends by the fire, the handkerchief an old gentleman left, the log someone threw away. Do you understand what this means? This is a house where, as soon as you enter, you find you have lost the anonymity that the late-20th century and its centralised communications network imposes on you. Because of Mr Sparry you feel you are
someone
here.

‘Kettle on?’ A large face had come round the door. ‘Double-glazing,’ muttered Mr Hale from his place by the fire, but Mr Sparry the impresario was waving his long fingers. ‘This gentleman knows all there is to be known about double-glazing,’ he announced. I asked the newcomer if this was so, for I thought they were pulling my leg. ‘Someone has to sell double-glazing,’ he said cheerfully, ‘before that I was in the fish and chip business.’ With great restraint Mr Sparry did not proclaim him the Emperor of Batter.

There are just four rooms to the house, plus the lean-to kitchen. The front room downstairs contains the books, the front room upstairs, the relics. Mr Sparry sleeps in the back bedroom, a fascinating room full of treasures, such as an old
Eagle
and a handwritten 1864 Hebrew and Chaldee commentary to the Bible. A Chaldee commentary? ‘A lifetime’s work,’ said Mr Sparry. Over the bed hang four photographs of King Edward’s Stourbridge, the local school he once attended. ‘That’s me’ — a small face is peering round someone else’s shoulders as though a pixie had strayed into the group. Mr Sparry is not in any of the other photographs but they hang over his bed as well. A book beguilingly entitled
The Treatment of Trade-Waste Waters and the Prevention of River Pollution
will one day be read, since he is interested in reclamation. He is interested in comedians too, and etymologists, and local industrial slang, and teddy bears; he gives talks on each of these to local societies. He keeps notes in labelled plastic bags.

But it is the back room between kitchen and bookshop that is puzzling, being at odds with the other indices to Mr Sparry. The room is full of drums and xylophones, for Mr Sparry is a jazz musician and part of a group. ‘This drum was autographed by Eric Delaney,’ he said and stopped, puzzled by the lack of reaction. ‘You’ve not heard of Eric Delaney? That is true, is it? You’ve not heard of Eric Delaney?’ Then you begin to appreciate that behind the tea-drinking heroes there is the shadowy outline of even greater men. But such thoughts were interrupted by the door opening as into the kitchen stepped Mr Ray Ashton, The Man Who Bumped into a King. He groaned as he was persuaded to tell the tale — ‘Again?’ said Mr Ashton.

During the war Mr Ashton was demonstrating the electrical circuit of a car. What sort of day was it? They were in a tent, said Mr Ashton. The ground was uneven, and the King stumbled. He would have fallen had he not collided with Mr Ashton. What had he said to the King? ‘Pardon me.’ And what had the King said to Mr Ashton? ‘Sorry.’

The Examinee

OUNDS OF SUMMER
: a lawnmower clattering into life, the ragged sound of clapping at a village cricket match, a burst of pop music out of nowhere that you do not wish to hear. But there are other sounds of summer. Close your eyes. Listen. No matter how long ago, 30 years, 50, they are vivid now as ever they were. Silence first, but a silence broken when someone coughs. It is a cough in a large room and it echoes, setting off other sounds. Someone moves his feet. There is a rustle of paper. And then it begins. The metronome of footsteps as a man walks up and down, up and down, between the avenues of desks. Remember now? You are back where you never want to be again, in the examination halls of your youth. You are in the hunting preserve of Mr Terry Tyacke of Trowbridge.

Mr Tyacke sat an A level this summer, and the press and television crews descended on Trowbridge, for it was his 22nd A level, and in Physical Education, for, after 20 years of exams, he is beginning to run out of subjects. English, Maths and Geography, he stalked these long ago, seeking them out where they lurked in their various examination boards. He has sat so many that if he gets PE, he will be forced to set his sights on something nobody ever sat at A level. Mr Tyacke will take Philosophy.

‘I’ve been meaning to have a stab at that for some time, but it’ll be real hard going, that one,’ said Mr Tyacke among his trophies. To be precise, his trophy. On a handwritten piece of notepaper he has recorded subjects, boards, dates and grades.

It all turns on whether he gets PE. It had been a toss-up whether he would take that or Photography this year. ‘But I didn’t have a camera so I thought that might be a bit of a draw-back with Photography,’ he said with the sort of unanswerable logic that augurs well for Philosophy. Even so, he had not taken into account the practical exam in PE which required him to run the 100 metres in 11 seconds, play in a hockey game and throw the javelin. He thinks he may have clocked 11 seconds for his javelin run-up, but his 100 metres was off all the stop-watches and the examiner forgot to bring an egg timer.

‘No. I don’t mind you laughing,’ said Mr Tyacke generously. ‘It’s a game to me, but you have to admit, it’s a very different sort of game from what most people play.’ He became a national figure when, egged on by his twelve-year-old grandson, he entered the
Guinness Book of Records
, every new edition of which now has updated his growing bag of A levels. That was when the press started calling. ‘Even the
Sun
rang me up. Gave me a shock that did. I can tell you. Luckily they never rang back, for God knows what they might have dug up about me.’

It all began 23 years ago when Susan, his only child, was sitting her O levels, and to keep her company, as he puts it, Terry, a Royal Navy shipwright for 22 years, and his wife Morwenna also signed up for what he calls ‘a bundle of O levels’. It is a lovely phrase: you can see the two of them staggering along under the weight. That was the start for the Great Examinee.

A man who had left school without a single O level had passed fourteen of them when he became aware of an even greater escarpment looming above him, and moved into the foothills of A levels. By now exams had become a way of life for the Tyackes, for when Susan left school to join the Civil Service her parents went on. Every summer there was a new bundle, and when the exams were over they treated themselves to a meal out. Mrs Tyacke died in 1992, but her husband could not abandon the old ways.

‘I don’t want to go to university. That’d be too big a commitment. A levels do me, a nine-month job, sign on in September at the local college and then wait. It’s a bit like being pregnant really.’

Every September the young get younger, and he is a little older. For History he did not even bother to sign on at any educational establishment, but studied that himself (‘I felt I’d lived the bugger’). As for the other subjects, the local college at Trowbridge has a new wing now. Terry feels he has paid for most of it.