Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (11 page)

‘It is from special Madame Mao recipe,' said his wife. ‘With purpose of building healthy citizen-soldiers and at the same time destroying ugly capitalist greed-orientated appetite. Is sawdust foo yong full of nourishing synthetic protein, guaranteed free from artificial colouring.'

Lao forked a moist blob of the khaki paste into his mouth, blenched, and pushed the bowl away. His wife, poised for ideological advantage, raised an eyebrow.

‘Well?' she said dangerously.

‘Oh,' cried Piu-Fong, ‘how all-seeing and talented is the great mother of our people!'

She narrowed her eyes.

‘What are you trying to pull, revisionist fink?' she grated.

‘Nothing. But see how my former fascist greed and unMarxist appetite have disappeared through the wisdom of Mother Mao! Not one more mouthful need I eat, so successful has her policy proved.'

Mrs. Piu-Fong threw down her chopstick.

‘Do you refuse, therefore, to give me the opportunity of self-criticism? Am I not to be allowed to repent for my deviation from the recipe as laid down by Madame Mao?'

‘No,' said Lao. A tiny gloat ran across his lips. But it was short-lived.

‘So!' cried his wife. ‘Can it be, subversive louse, that you failed to notice the forbidden bean-curd, introduced by me for the sole purpose of testing your awareness of Madame Mao's edicts?'

A sob shook the mean little room. Broken, Lao Piu-Fong pushed back his stool and stood up raggedly, and bowed a small, pitiful bow.

‘Am going to bed,' he said hoarsely. ‘Am going to bed for purpose of self-castigation. Am indeed an unworthy husband and dialectician. So sorry.'

And, leaving her smiling terribly at the portrait on the wall, he trudged into the neighbour room and threw himself upon the unyielding palliasse.

But self-criticism would not come, no matter how hard he tried. Each time he began to enumerate his deviations, slim bodies danced out of his memory and writhed before him, a thousand faces rose up from his imagination to smile and kiss, a thousand slim, seductive hands reached for his unworthy flesh. Until, at last, the incorrigible capitalist spirit of Citizen-Soldier Lao Piu-Fong fell into restless slumber, to dream its dreams of counter-revolution.

11
Death Duties

U
p until now, it may not have been generally known that I live in a flat whose previous tenant shuffled off this mortal coil owing Selfridge's 12/6. But eighteen months is long enough to live with the increasing burden that this debt has come to represent; and since, on the question of responsibility, I am less of an island than most men you run across, I feel the need to spread the weight a little.

I know almost nothing about my predecessor, except that she departed this life peacefully at a commendably advanced age; I learned only a little more from the sad trickle of uninformed post that kept turning up after I moved in – she did the pools, she voted, she read
The Reader's Digest
, and she once spent a holiday in Torquay at a hotel that persists in inviting her to Gala Gourmet Weekends which, from the manager's imploring circular, obviously won't be the same without her. At some time in her life, she purchased enough roofing-felt from a firm in Acton to warrant an annual calendar's gratitude, and, long before that, she had been a pupil at a girls' school in Roehampton which has now fallen on evil times and needs £5,000 to drive the woodworm from its ancient bones.

I dutifully sent these voices from the past back to the land of the living, marked ‘Address Unknown', together with a brace of Christmas cards wishing her peace, a sentiment I feel bound to endorse. The only things I held on to (all right, this is probably a heinous crime under some sub-section or other, but, believe me, I have paid in full for it) were a series of polite notes from Selfridge's, requesting the coughing-up of 12/6.

I had my own nefarious reasons for this peccadillo. Back in the early days, it came to me (not unlike a shaft of pure white light) that here I was with an invaluable index of consumer-tolerance, i.e., How far was Selfridge's prepared to go before they cried havoc and let loose the dogs of war? Were I ever to consider running up a fat bill with them, this information would stand me in the best of steads, since, the longer one can delay the payment of bills the better, inflation being what it is. (I have never been too certain what it is, actually, but as a kid I used to buy 1930 billion-mark German stamps at threepence a hundred, and a thing like that sticks in your memory.) Whatever Mrs. X bought for 12/6 in 1962 doubtless goes out at around fifteen bob these days, and if she's reading this now under some Elysial hairdryer, bless her, I hope she takes comfort from the thought that she got out while the going was good.

So, just to test the plan, I hung on, opening the three-monthly reminders, waiting for the sort of filthy innuendo
I
usually get in these circumstances about what a pity it is that I mislaid their bill and if I don't fork out in seven days, my humble and obedient servants will be round with the boys and have the telly back and no mistake. But nothing like that ever came. A year passed with the characteristic rapidity of its kind, leaves fell off the rubber-plant, the odd crow's foot stamped itself around my limpid eyes, and still Selfridge's continued to beg the pardon of the dead, and nothing more. I began to lay complex plans for capitalising on this inside knowledge. I walked the store, floor by floor, choosing one of them, two of those, fifty square yards of that, and so on, in order that when I came to make my move, I could draw up in an articulated truck by the goods entrance and be away from the place with a complete home in about ten minutes flat, with every chance of hanging on to luxury for a year or so. It was on one such drooling foray that my best-laid schemes ganged agley and withered on my brow in one fell metaphor; turning a sharp right at a bolt of Gustav Doré chintz, I came upon a scene that made the death of Little Nell look like a Groucho Marx routine; a tiny, lacey, delicate old lady, a butterfly emeritus exuding spiritual lavender, was pressing a small package on a salesman. She was going away, I heard her whisper, and she wanted to give him something to remember her by; he was, she said softly, not a salesman, but her dear, dear friend. I staggered out into, I believe, Gloucester Place, choking with Truth. She was, of course,
my
little old lady, or as near as made no odds; I'd become so enmeshed in the web of greedy intrigue currently on the loom that I had forgotten that there was more to my plan than just Selfridge's and I, two hard-boiled toughs who might one day face one another down at High Noon in Carey Street. Never for one moment had I paused to consider the old lady who had gone to join her ancestors with 12/6 worth of Selfridge's money. The one obvious reason why the store hadn't sent its bruisers round to collect the debt had up until then escaped me – that Mrs. X had no doubt been a customer in those far-off Edwardian days when Harry Gordon Selfridge was still worrying about his mortgage repayments. Quite probably, she had been all set to go through the store for the last time, distributing cuff links and panatellas when the call for the long trip took her unawares, and it is more than clear to me that no one had informed Selfridge's of her passing. Suddenly, I saw her, a sweet soul, full of the simple goodness which is honed to a fine smooth finish on the
Reader's Digest
lathes; in my mind she sat filling in her Littlewood's coupons and praying for a first dividend to save the school from termites and provide everyone in Selfridge's with enough roofing-felt to last a lifetime. They must have missed her at the store, the living image of Whistler's mum, first up the escalator at the Sales (‘Put them ornamented bathmats aside for Mrs. X, Esmond, she's one of our reg'lars'), smiling at Uncle Holly year in, year out, remembering every liftboy at Christmas (‘It's little Horace, isn't it? My, we've grown, haven't we?'), a favourite with all the waitresses in the cafeteria, a paragon of virtue to the Accounts Dept.

I turned into Baker Street, the iron in my soul, another Raskolnikov with guilt for an old lady red on his hands. No doubt she had been missed at the store for eighteen months; rumours would be seething in the staff canteen, and, finally, half-apologetically, looking down into his tea-cup, someone would bring up the issue of her outstanding debt. At first, it would be excused, laughed off; but before long fifty years of graciousness would be swept away, and she would be written off as just another lousy customer, at one with the welshers and the shoplifters and the people who knocked things off shelves in the china department.

It was when I decided to make amends that the real horror of the things struck, in true Dostoievskian fashion; actions are irreversible, sin cannot be structurally altered. There was no way in which I could straighten the mess out; if I wrote to the store, explaining that their debtor was in no shape to square the account, they would wonder why I had taken nearly two years to contact them. It was even on the cards that I'd find myself opening the door to a couple of characters in fawn raincoats demanding to know what I'd done with the body. Similarly, were I able to trace her descendants, what could I say? (‘Look, I hate to stir old memories, but your dear mother/aunt/sister owes Selfridge's 12/6'). How would they react to the stain imprinted by me on their loved one's reputation? I was the one who'd made her, post-mortally, a rotten financial risk, and dragged the good name of X through the mire. For all I knew, they might take it out on me by having me sent down for tampering with the mails, or something, and I understand they're handing out thirty years for that these days.

Last week, another demand-note turned up. The tone had shifted slightly to one of gentlemanly bewilderment; I knew the omens of old. I had to forestall the ultimatum; like Macbeth, I was in blood stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er. Only one course of action lay open; I put a ten-bob note and a half-crown in an envelope, together with a note explaining that I had been laid up for two years with a wasting disease and only now was I beginning to pull through, and I hoped they would understand, theirs, with every apology, Mrs. X.

That ought to hold them for a bit. But you can never be sure about these things, and if they decide to have a whip round in the Soft Furnishings and send me a Get Well card and a jar of crystallised ginger, I may yet have to go on the run.

‘The Funniest Writer In
Britain Today'
1970–1979

VICTORIA WOOD

Introduction

I
was thirteen. I couldn't manage my breasts. I couldn't manage my eating. I never did my homework. I lived in a misbuttoned guilt-ridden fog most of the time. I had two consolations. One was food – which can, as we know, prove a false friend, but at thirteen one doesn't realise the many tedious years that lie ahead, as one tries to unpick the knotted relationship between comfort, joy and American hard gums.

My other consolation – and this remains a true pal – was comedy. Not television comedy, which for the most part in the mid 1960s was twee, leaden and over-reliant on canned laughter, but written comedy.

My house, which was an ex-anti-aircraft base on a windswept hill in Lancashire, had been made into an approximation of a family home by my mother, who had put up plywood partitions, not exactly at random but not in any way William Morris might have salivated over either. Having by this method formed about twenty rooms, she then proceeded to fill them all with books. Second-hand books. Sometimes she would chuck in the odd rogue item, like the costumes from a production of
The Quaker Girl
, or a sack of shoe lasts, but mainly it was books.

And because there was eff-all going on in my home, and because I was a compulsive person, and I didn't have enough money to eat all day long, and the telly didn't come on till four, I read. In the bath, while playing the piano, while watching
Magpie
and
The Man from UNCLE
– I read. And though I would read anything rather than nothing, what I really wanted to read was comedy.

I had a tattered paperback, I should think from the 1930s, called
Modern Masters of Wit and Humour
and this was my introduction to the comic essay, the funny piece. It didn't matter to me that these particular pieces were all by men, that there didn't seem to be any modern mistresses of wit and humour – I just loved the detail, the angle, the taking of some prosaic domestic situation and skewing it through a prism, so that something that presumably in life had been irritating or boring became something quite life-enhancing in print.

I went to the library every day after school – I had to wait an hour for my father to pick me up from the bottom of our lane. I wasn't supposed to walk home in case I got molested, though I think even a sexual nutcase might have thought twice about approaching my solid trudging figure with its flapping satchel of homework arrears and its trail of wine gums. Oh, get to the point, Wood. Yes: the library. Bury Library. Like a big old municipal crack house just sitting there full of my drug of choice. And what they had in the Reference section was
Punch
. Not the old bound volumes with their unhilarious yokels, cooks and curates, but the current magazine.
Modern Masters of Wit and Humour
thirty years on.

And that was where I first read Alan Coren. You might not think a thirteen-year-old girl with collapsing socks and a pocket full of chocolate with a street value of ninepence would have been his ideal reader. But I was. He made me laugh. It wasn't my world, but it was no less funny for that. For those two pages, I lived in his universe. I wasn't in Bury with a dull evening ahead of me – luncheon meat, beetroot and
The Forsyte Saga
– I was in Cricklewood wondering what was up with the central heating, or trying to get my raincoat back from the dry cleaner's.

Let's jump forward nearly forty years. Leapfrogging Dana, loonpants, perestroika, ‘The Birdie Song' and red pesto. My homework's still not done, but my behaviour around Creme Eggs is slightly more under control, and there I was in my kitchen in London with the radio on and I was listening to one of those mad programmes you could only get on the wireless – it was Alan Coren and a friend going round London on buses, just maundering on about things and getting on and off when they felt like it, and just acting like boys, really – oldish boys. And I heard a bus number I recognised: it was the bus that goes up Our Hill and stops outside Our House. And I can't really explain what a thrill it was to hear that master of wit and humour, Mr Alan Coren – to hear him get off the bus at the top of Our Hill and actually hear the crunch of his humorous feet on Our Gravel. And if it had been live, and if I had been gawping out of my bedroom window, I would have been able to see him. And I meant, were I ever to meet him, to say: ‘Hello, Alan, we've never been introduced, but you got off the bus onto my gravel, and you've made me laugh from when I was thirteen. Thank you.' But I didn't get that opportunity, so writing this is the next best thing.