Going Up (19 page)

Leslie had written all of the lyrics and composed several of the tunes. The rest of the musical work, and the orchestration, fell on Robin Beaumont, a handsome, versatile musician. Leslie took it for granted (neither Robin nor I chose to dissent) that he himself deserved a shared credit in both the writing and the music. The three of us were a triumvirate in which there was no doubt who played Julius Caesar. When the programmes for
Lady
at the Wheel
arrived, a couple of days before we were due to open, the front cover announced the credits that we had all agreed, but there was a supplementary line, at the bottom of the page, in bold capital letters: ‘The entire show devised and produced by Leslie Bricusse’. I was not pleased. When I indicated as much to Leslie, he said, ‘Bloody printers!’

Success swept away petty resentment; in truth, Leslie could fairly claim that it could never have happened without his organisational thrust. The first-night house was full; laughs came immediately and loudly. Judging from the applause, the songs, however jejune (‘Somewhere, somehow, some
day…’), might have been by Jerome Kern. Leslie and I sat on the top steps of the circle swamped by a delectable torrent of laughter and cheers. I was anxious lest the second-act breakfast scene would be too slow, but Gordon Gould’s drollery proved even funnier than in rehearsal. Another American recruit to the show, Mike Kitay, did a virtuoso meta-Charleston dance routine that capped the final scene, in which, of course, Jinx’s car won the rally, the German driver was disqualified and everything ended as happily as contrivance could manage. Even the ranks of Tuscany could scarcely deny that we had had a triumph. Gordon Gould had the grace to seek me out and apologise for his lofty reluctance to give himself into our hands.

Yet another American graduate student, James Ferman, had been in our audience and declared himself willing to be involved in a future production by the Musical Comedy Club. He had had experience of the musical stage while at Cornell. Like Norwood Russell Hanson, he had been in the US air force, although never in combat. With a keen smile and a drophead second-hand MG, he soon took up with Monica Beament, who was, in Groucho Marxist terms, something like the ‘college widow’. A divorcée famed for her lack of inhibitions, she rode round Cambridge, in red slacks with obvious fly-buttons, on a hand-painted bicycle with an unfeminine crossbar. I had acted with her in a production by Miles Malleson of Turgenev’s
A Month in the Country
.

Malleson was recognisable in British films because of his lack of a chin. He had played the obsequious hangman with the silken cord in Robert Hamer’s
Kind Hearts and Coronets
. His beautiful wife Constance made him the best-known, and most complaisant, cuckold in the theatre: she was Bertrand Russell’s mistress. I played the part of Turgenev’s sulky artist. Malleson instructed me in tactful direction by asking whether I ‘felt like sitting down’ on a certain line.

After the last night of
A Month in the Country
, there was a party in a big house somewhere off Jesus Lane. I left my coat in a deep closet and had
to go in, and out of sight, to find it. While I was in there, I heard two people, one our business manager, a north Londoner called Derek Taylor, the other John Tanfield, our leading man, who was a star teacher at the Perse School, talking quietly about someone who ‘could be charming when he wants to’ but tended to be ‘a bit too clever for his own good’. I wondered for a minute or so who this vexing person might be. Then Derek said, ‘What can you do? That’s Freddie for you!’ I stayed in the closet until, as movie people say, they cleared.

Lady at the Wheel
was denounced as flash, vulgar and much too American for the taste of Cambridge critics dedicated to the common pursuit of self-importance. Leslie’s rooms became a mecca for chancers of one kind and another. An aspirant literary publisher, Peter Marchant, came for advice on raising funds for a new magazine, in which he promised to feature my work. Peter de Brandt, a handsome, well-funded playboy, appeared in the hope of making contact with some of the pneumatic girls who had rallied so willingly to Leslie’s call. He had been introduced to a beautiful French call girl in the summer vac. Uncertain how to begin, he tried talking about Balzac. The girl looked at her watch, took off some of her clothes and then, ‘as if she were going to pray to me’, made a wanton frontal attack on her client. ‘Well worth the ten pounds.’ I never saw de Brandt again, but I attached his name, slightly modified, to Julie Christie’s demon lover, Miles Brand, played by Laurence Harvey, in
Darling
.

At the beginning of the following term, I returned to the offices of
Varsity
and proposed myself as a contributor to the new editor. Like Trevor Chinn, Michael Winner was a curly-haired London Jew of a brasher style than I ever dared or cared to flash. He sported an unreformed accent that owed nothing to Oxbridge phonetics and a slouchy black leather
blouson
. Before coming up, he had bluffed his way into the job of movie critic for a clutch of suburban newspapers. I never guessed from his impersonation of an upwardly mobile barrow-boy that his father was a very rich man.
I played the old Fleet Street hand and was offered a column in the paper. It was no great chore to compose 800 words on weekly topics that might yield a laugh or provoke brief outrage.

Nicholas Tomalin was president-elect of the Union, as well as a joint editor of
Granta
, in which he had sniped at
Lady at the Wheel
for selling out to what is now known as ‘product placement’: in a café scene, Colin Cantlie (a general’s son) had asked, in a Teutonic way, for ‘drinking chocolate’. In return, Cadbury’s agreed to buy a full page of advertising in the programme. It seemed an innocuous iniquity, but Nick denounced it as the insidious thin end of venal commercialisation. Envy and moral presumption are the twin propellers of journalism.

Not long afterwards, Tomalin sensationalised his presidency of the Union by inviting Oswald Mosley to come and speak. Mosley’s Fascist past had not disposed him to post-war self-effacement. He advocated his cleansed version of ‘Europeanism’ with the rhetorical adroitness and virile posturing that had won him admirers literally left and right. In a
Varsity
interview, Nick announced that our soft generation had been intimidated by what amounted to ‘a row of asterisks’ into reacting with incoherent indignation at ideas that we could not articulate. For our political education, Mosley merited a hearing. The Holocaust was never mentioned either in the debate or in print.

The column in which I denounced Master Tomalin appeared after Mosley had paraded the civilised version of himself at the Union. There had been no ugly scenes, although the police were out in some force and the CU Socialist (i.e. Communist) Party had deployed a phalanx of its five or six cadres to cry down the Fascist. I remarked that, while Mosley ‘behaved quite well’, it had been Nick’s crude pleasure to put the cat among the goldfish and the plutonium into the reactor. Ignoring what Mosley’s Fascist friends had done, he depicted as hooligans only those who opposed him. Tomalin’s self-promotion made me quite eager for a cup of honest drinking chocolate. If I had a desire to give Nick a double dose of his own medicine,
I had no solemn grudge. My sarcasm owed more to the rhetorical vanities of Cicero and Juvenal than to personal animus. One display of undergraduate grub-street opportunism deserved another. Michael Winner was pleased to report that Nick was consulting his solicitor. I was sure that he was conducting an exercise in intimidation; and I was right: no suit was brought.

A few years later, I had lunch at Overton’s fish restaurant, in Victoria, at a table next to Mosley and his friends. Dressed in a whitish tweedy suit, like a bookie in his Epsom best, he was liver-spotted, thick-bodied and hump-shouldered. His most noticeable feature was the large, jutting nose. He called out in a cultured voice, ‘Two more brandies, waiter,’ and smiled without showing too many uneven, varicoloured teeth. He spoke of ‘Hugh’ (Dalton) and ‘Nye’ (Bevan) and ‘Anthony’ (Eden) with equal familiarity.

My
Varsity
column’s term of eight issues impelled me to obey the dictum of Byron’s pugilistic coach and ‘mill away right and left’. Under deadline pressure, I found occasion to repeat in print Joe Bain’s allegation that Bob Gottlieb and his wife, like the three Greek mythological crones who shared a single eye, disposed of only one pair of spectacles between them. What fellow citizen of Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott would resent a little knockabout? In fact, my squib made Gottlieb my lifelong and, in due time, powerful enemy. Did my willingness to make him my butt have anything to do with the fact that he was, as I was under the skin, an American Jew?

Gottlieb’s sights were set on a career beyond Cambridge and outside England. He accelerated to literary, rather than theatrical, importance. He joined, and later presided over, the New York publishers Simon & Schuster. In 1987, he was appointed editor of the
New Yorker
, only to disappoint its owners. They replaced him with Tina Brown, whose cosmetic extravagance goosed the magazine into the Age of Celebrity. Once in an influential position, Gottlieb took remorseless revenge on me for my juvenile squibs by scorning my novels in the US, for which he could be forgiven, though not by me. He had by that time disposed of his first, bespectacled wife.

When I heard that Jim Ferman, whom I scarcely knew, had passed scathing comment on the witlessness of
Lady at the Wheel
, I used journalistic licence to refer to him as ‘Grim Jim’. As my deadline approached, even the beautiful Joan Rowlands, with whom I played tennis on the Newnham grass court, was labelled ‘the Bakewell Tart’ with Grub Street lack of scruple. The celebrated future Baroness Bakewell took it well, and I was glad; but I learned how easily journalism becomes a solvent of loyalties.

I took my cue from Bernard Levin’s pseudonymous column in
The Spectator
. His ‘Taper’ was the scourge of the resurgent Tories. The attorney general, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, had been promptly, not all that subtly, dubbed ‘Sir Reginald Bullying-Manner’; Sir Hartley Shawcross was re-sectioned into ‘Sir Shortly Floor-Cross’, which was indeed apt: the suave ‘socialist’ lawyer who had said, in 1945, ‘We are the masters now’ was soon to rally to the capitalist cause and became the chief legal pundit for Shell Oil. My mother went shopping with his wife in Putney High Street.

David Gore-Lloyd was absent from Montagu Road during most of the summer term of 1954. Diagnosed with testicular cancer, he had to go into hospital for the treatment then current for what is now one of the more easily cured forms of carcinoma. The bedroom above mine and Beetle’s was taken over, at least some of the time, by little Dudy Foulds and her very tall lover John Nimmo. He walked her around Cambridge with his hand resting on the top of her head. At night, they made protracted love directly above our heads. ‘Our gal Rosemary Clooney’ singing on the American Forces Network was not enough to drown the sound of their accelerating bed. When David Gore-Lloyd returned, briefly, it was at the wheel of a grey Ford Popular, a present from his parents. It had a vertically striated metal radiator and a crank for emergency starts. Believing that he was cured, David drove us to Royston for celebratory tea in a nice hotel.

Beetle’s job at the Appointments Board was not unduly testing. Jack Davies took her to Lord’s and showed her the mementos in the Long Room.
He wore his handkerchief up his sleeve and referred to his son as ‘the boy’. The other secretaries treated ‘Miss Glatt’ politely, but she became aware, as she consulted the cabinets in which were filed the confidential details of undergraduate job-seekers and their possible employers, that Davies’s colleagues took candid appraisal to anti-Semitic lengths. One of our acquaintances was ticketed as ‘looks Jewy and wears Jewy-cut clothes’. Nor were prospective employers spared: ‘Looks like a Jewish Mr Truman.’ Jack Davies was innocent of these routine reflexes; but Beetle was sufficiently indignant to take discreet copies.

During the vacations, I returned like any creeping Turk to Manor Fields. I purloined the phrase ‘creeping Turk’ from a poem in the works of T. E. Hulme, a pugnacious Johnian of proto-fascistic tendencies acquired mainly from French sources. Hulme was killed at the age of thirty-three in the Great War. His
Speculations
were lodged in a trenchant, abrasive volume of philosophical
pensées
, inspired by Georges Sorel. His ‘Complete Poems’, consisting of a dozen or so pieces in a bony symbolist style, supplied the appendix. At once anarchist, playboy and stylist, Hulme was a coiner of tellingly far-fetched phrases: one poem begins, ‘In finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy’. It supplies an apt rubric for modern financiers and politicians. One apocryphal story tells of Hulme pissing through the railings of Berkeley Square in the early hours. Approached by a constable in corrective mode, Hulme said, ‘I would have you know that you are addressing a member of the Middle Class.’ It is claimed that the constable said, ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ and folded away his notebook.

During my absences, Beetle continued to work in Cambridge. She did not lack handsome company, but I never doubted her fidelity, even when she was, unsurprisingly, found attractive by ‘Tadge’ Leadley, Olympic oarsman and president of the CU Boat Club; and not only by him. Her presence in Cambridge was sufficiently remarkable for her to be noticed, black hair streaming, as she pedalled, long-legged, past St John’s on her way to Chaucer
Road. I was told that Guy Lee, who had taught me Latin verse composition in my first year, met my tutor, R. L. Howland, and said to him, ‘Do you know about Freddie Raphael living with this beautiful dark-haired girl out in Montagu Road?’

‘No,’ Howland said.

Guy said, ‘Neither do I.’

M
Y FOURTH YEAR went quickly towards the mundane moment when I should have to decide, as my father said, frequently, how I proposed to make a living. I never considered going to the Appointments Board. While determined to be a novelist, I had no idea of where to find a suitable garret or how I should pay the rent. My idea of being a writer had nothing to do with money or even with success; to be published would be heaven enough. Leslie had plans for us to ‘write together’: he foresaw a future with an office with a big two-faced desk, a secretary and a convertible ‘wagon’. Meanwhile, I had my
Varsity
column to write, new numbers to devise for the May Week revue, and my approaching Finals. Compared with Tony Becher, I was inadequately prepared. I relied on lacing a pastiche of analytic jargon with clever instances. David Gore-Lloyd, whose medical treatment had procured him another year, which his parents could afford, before he had to take his Finals, was sure that if any of us was to get a First it would be me.

Early in the autumn term, Leslie contrived the resignation of Peter Stephens from the secretaryship of the Footlights and of Dermot Hoare from the committee. Without any manifestation of resentment on their part, I was co-opted as press secretary and Leslie’s grateful lieutenant. He and
I and Tony Becher wrote several funny sketches. David Conyers, the vice-president, joined me at one of the Smokers in doing the Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene number that I had composed among the mosquitoes in that Luccan
pensione
.

Leslie was determined that the 1954 revue would not resemble the haphazard
Cabbages and Kings
. The selection of material and of the cast for
Out of the Blue
would have nothing to do with fair shares. Only the best material and the best performers were to be involved. Although his renown as a sophisticated mimic – Bertrand Russell a speciality – was well established, Jonathan Miller rarely attended any of our Smokers. Even after he became a member of Princess Margaret’s set, he claimed not to own a dinner jacket. Jonathan let it be known that he was reluctant to be distracted from his medical studies. Nevertheless, his light shone very brightly from under its bushel.

Jonathan’s aloofness contributed to his
réclame
. He agreed only very slowly to be of our company, and on his own terms: his solo spots were not to be subject to the clock and he must not be required to take part in choruses or play a subsidiary role in any of the sketches. He had better things to do than to rehearse with the rest of the company. Although I did not even know of the Cambridge
conversazione
society’s existence, Jonathan had been convoked as a member of ‘the Apostles’; so too his homonym Karl Miller, who was no sort of a relation, although they later became brothers-in-law. Self-selecting intellectual grandees (John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey had set the mark), the Apostles, past and present, constituted a lifelong freemasonry that disdained publicity but had no aversion to intellectual and social preferment. The two Millers could be sure of friends in high, and hiring, places.

Cabbages and Kings
had had a large cast, not least because Peter Firth had neither aptitude nor appetite for imposing himself. He had gone on a monastic retreat immediately afterwards and was now training to become a
clergyman. Knowing that Firth had been approached by a London management company with a view to transferring the show to a West End theatre, but had turned them down, Leslie had invited the same impresarios to come to see
Lady at the Wheel
, which he told me they had greatly enjoyed and wanted ‘to talk to us about’. Of course, he remained in touch with them. Not for nothing did he already have that fat address book with alphabetic sections for London, Paris and New York.

At the beginning of the summer term, Leslie asked me to come for a walk with him. If he, like the Beaver in the old Fleet Street story, was now Napoleon, I was Marshal Yea. He had drafted a list of the proposed cast for the revue. Tony Becher was not on it. Did I think that he would mind? I was pretty sure he would. Leslie made the point that, being a non-singer, Tony added no volume to the choruses and now figured in only one or two of the sketches on the shortlist. Could I not put it to him, as his friend, that he would do better to concentrate on his Finals? Leslie would have done it himself, but it would be more convincing coming from me. Of course Tony’s name would still be in the programme, as author of the things we had all written together.

Tony appeared less mortified than I feared. His ground-floor back room in Montagu Road was a hermetic cell in which he applied himself to canonical texts with such diligence that he rarely changed his socks. The pungency of the atmosphere secured uninterrupted privacy. He came to the communal lunches that I always prepared and for which Beetle often cycled home from Chaucer Road, but his housekeeping was limited to helping with the washing up and returning burlap sacks of the small glass Express Dairy yoghurt bottles (‘yogs’ in Becher-speak) that had accumulated during the week. For the rest, he kept his nose in his books.

28 Montagu Road was too inaccessible to rival 5 Jordan’s Yard as a social fulcrum, but Joe Bain and John Sullivan, who had stayed in Cambridge to do research in some Silver Age mine of underrated texts, were regular visitors.
When Michael Jurgens arrived with a tomcat kitten for Beetle, Tony Becher took a cruel dislike to it. John Sullivan’s erotic life had been in abeyance during previous term-times, but he was now emancipated enough to invite his Liverpudlian lady, to whom, to our surprise, he announced himself to be engaged, to come and stay for a few days.

Mary turned out to be a person of a certain age, at least thirty it looked, and of little pronounced charm. Could this be the woman who, with delectable shamelessness, had reached between his legs, and hers, to bring him off? She came to a meal at Montagu Road at the same time as Joe Bain, who was never unwilling to entertain the company. We laughed; Mary did not. Sullivan reported that she had concluded that there was nothing wrong with Joe that a bit of hanging wouldn’t put right. Why had John chosen to marry her? It was as if, now that he was able to cut free and sail away from Liverpool, he had decided to haul up the anchor and lug it with him.

Renford Bambrough listened impartially to our essays, but had an easier harmony with Tony Becher than with me. I shall, however, forever be in his debt. Towards the end of my last term, Renford alerted me that the college administered a bequest, by a clergyman called Harper Wood, which funded an annual studentship of £350 to allow a prospective ‘creative writer’ to go on his travels and widen his horizons. The award was wholly outside the usual run of academic prizes: no one studied ‘creative writing’ in 1950s English universities. People had to go to Iowa for that sort of thing.

In the previous year, Harper Wood’s bounty had been bestowed on Thom Gunn. I once sat opposite him on an 85 bus going up Putney Hill, but we did not speak. Pock-marked, unsmiling and zippily leather-jacketed, he looked as if he would be happier astride a Harley Davidson. He dedicated an early volume of his poems to his lover Mike Kitay, the pale, freckled, curly-haired American whose solo dance had been a
tour de force
in
Lady at the Wheel
. Thom Gunn followed Kitay to the US, where he came out as a butch, biker-style homosexual. His precocious first volume of verse,

published in 1954, was entitled
Fighting Terms
. He was aggressively committed to the lifestyle that he found in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in San Francisco, where he died of substance abuse without apology or, I imagine, regret. Mike Kitay was with him to the end.

The only hurdle between me and the almost literally heaven-sent opportunity to enjoy the Reverend Harper Wood’s legacy was an interview with Hugh Sykes-Davies, a portly, bibulous don who taught English literature and had rooms in Chapel Court. An ex-Communist Apostle of the same generation as Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, Sykes-Davies would emerge briefly from cloistered obscurity, in 1964, when Blunt was revealed as a Soviet spy. In accordance with Morgan Forster’s ethos, he disdained to turn his back on the unfrocked knight and announced that, if Anthony called, he would welcome him with a friendly glass. Such conduct was in character with the author of Sykes-Davies’s surrealist novel in which, after a period as a rat-catcher, the hero, one Andrew Melmoth, elects to go down into the sewers and join the vermin who will take over the world and manage it more equably than human beings. Sykes-Davies himself would be appointed ‘college rat-catcher’ in 1967.

Joe Bain told me that Hugh, who had instructed him in the genius of William Wordsworth (another old Johnian), had been in the habit of leaving his claret-coloured curtains drawn during sunny afternoons, as a result of which, according to the college housekeeper, the material was fading and threatened to perish. He was formally requested by the formidable lady to open his curtains during daylight hours. He did as he was asked, but took to walking around his rooms, with the curtains wide open, in a state of ostentatious and rubicund nakedness. The interdiction on drawn curtains was rescinded.

H. S.-D. was fully dressed, if rumpled, when I went to see him. I had prepared an impressive catalogue of novels that I had read and admired and a list of socially responsible reasons why novelists, no less than Shelley’s
poet, should and could be the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Sykes-Davies did not invite me to sit down. Did I really want this Harper Wood thing? Indeed I did. If he asked a few supplementary questions, he took small note of the answers. The brisk upshot was that the thing was mine if I really wanted it. With no marked sense of election, I walked back into Chapel Court after being promised enough money to keep me on the move for at least six months.

Thanks to Renford, Sykes-Davies and the Reverend Harper Wood, my immediate future was immune to mundane considerations, except for the matter of nationality. Since both Great Britain and the US still maintained conscription, I could not retain my dual citizenship. During the four years in which I had led, in the Empsonian sense, a pastoral life, secluded from brute realities in the bell jar of undergraduate playfulness, the war in Korea had been concluded, if not quite won, by Douglas MacArthur’s master-stroke in landing a large force behind the North Koreans’ front line. According to the liberal press, MacArthur had wanted to eliminate the menace of Red China by using nuclear weapons. He was recalled, in glorious disgrace, by Harry Truman. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been elected President in 1952 not least because he promised a quick, negotiated end to the war (as Charles de Gaulle proved, a decade later, once-victorious generals can best bring off such quiet retreats). The US no longer had need of a large army; although conscription remained on the statute book, recruitment had been suspended.

Great Britain was engaged in no overt war, but unrest in various parts of the Empire, as well as tension in the Suez Canal Zone, kept conscription in practical operation. I dreaded two years of khaki sequestration in some dull English posting, with or without pips on my shoulders. I wanted to live with Beetle and be a writer. If I told myself that I should be wise to keep the option of easy entry into the US, it was not because I ever expected to live there permanently. I opted for US citizenship and was rewarded with a
card from President Eisenhower which thanked me for my loyalty and confirmed that there was no likelihood of my being required to report for duty.

Out of the Blue
opened a week or so after Tony Becher and I had completed our last Tripos papers. Jonathan Miller was the undoubted star, but David Conyers and I received an ovation at the end of our impersonations of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. The applause went on and on. There were cries of ‘more’. We took one step towards a reprise, but the stage manager, Peter Scroggs, waved us away. Thanks to Leslie’s energetic diplomacy, the offer that Peter Firth had rejected, for the revue to transfer to London for two weeks, was renewed; this time, it was promptly accepted. We were to go first to Oxford and then to the Phoenix Theatre, off the Charing Cross Road, opposite Foyle’s (and the Damarrhoid dispensary).

During the last days of our run at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, which had been endowed by Maynard Keynes, Leslie took me for one of our walks in the secluded first court of Caius. The show would be strengthened, he thought, if two or three of the best numbers from the 1952 Footlights revue were added, and the weaker of the present ones deleted. One of the latter featured me and David Conyers as a couple of bitching dogs. Leslie proposed that ‘Not a Man on My Ottoman’ and a number called ‘Joe and the Boys’ as well as the final chorus with the refrain ‘It will always be the same’ and a succulently sucrose tune, should be resuscitated from the archives.

When I made a sour face at the reduction of my appearances, Leslie suggested that I audition for the part of the Joe Loss lookalike band leader in ‘Joe and the Boys’ from the 1952 revue. He had to admit that he had already mentioned the part to Brian Marber. Brian was a genuine droll and, as he had shown in the tango-type song he sang in
Lady at the Wheel
, he could sing in tune. I was sure that Leslie was going through the motions of offering me a chance to do something that he did not think I was up to; I also suspected he was right.

A few mornings later, Brian and I turned up for our
mano-a-mano
in
the empty Arts Theatre. There was no band of extras to back our performances. Everything seemed to depend on how one presented oneself on stage and made the opening announcement:

Brian and I tossed a coin and I was sent in to bat first. I went into the wings, while Leslie lolled in the front stalls and Brian stood to one side. Something possessed me to enter with my knees bent almost double. I seemed to ride across the boards on a low trolley of air. In a voice of suitable Tin Pan Alley vulgarity, I made Joe’s little declaration, smirking in a way that would have earned applause from the Harry person who met me backstage after I had mugged so blatantly in the Mummers. My improvised funny walk had gained the day before I said a word. Assuming that I would fail had made me shameless and, it proved, unbeatable. Brian did his best to follow and trump me, but he conceded, very sportingly, that there was no contest.